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“The past and me have got to break up,” Bono sings in the verse that opens “Carnaval de Luz,” U2’s first full-length album of all-new material in nine years. It sounds
like a mission statement, doesn’t it? The singer doesn’t linger long on combating nostalgia or breaking out of ingrained patterns, or whatever he means to suggest there. But you can rest assured, if you’ve ever read any U2 interviews this century, that the band is constantly wrestling with its legacy and how to move forward with relevance, just as certainly as Jacob wrestled the angel in “Bullet the Blue Sky.” They have been known to overthink it all, and impatient fans have been known to want to to say: Just put down your pencils and turn in your work, boys!
It kind of feels like that’s what the band has done with “Carnaval de Luz,” a definitely imperfect but also rewarding and interesting addition to U2’s 46-year catalog. In a “liner notebook” he wrote to accompany the album, Bono quips that “putting the messy in the messianic (is) the job of the frontman.” And there’s messiness aplenty in these 12 songs, which don’t always hang together as easily coherent statements but contain literally hundreds of quotable, fascinating, self-effacingly funny or deeply poetic lines, as if he penned a year’s worth of TED talks about God, the devil, love, ego and our shared humanity and fed them all into a blender. Not that the lyrics are completely random; Spanish phrases abound, and the album is loosely themed around Latin America’s pre-Lent celebrations, just as the two EPs U2 put out earlier this year were tied to Ash Wednesday and Easter. U2 finally figured out how to carve out an album out of all the material they’d amassed by pulling together the songs that best fit a carnaval theme. Suffice it to say, anyway, that as “party albums” go, this is a pretty complicated one, dense in wily aphorisms excavating the realms of philosophy and pop theology.
But maybe you don’t want to know about where Bono is in his spiritual quest. You want to know: Does the album rock, in a less radio-conscious or tentative way than some of the albums they were putting out in the 2000s and 2010s? Yes, by and large — and the way in which it rocks is closer to the U2 of the ’90s than an attempt to exactly replicate the signature sounds of the ’80s. One of the hookiest tracks, “La Reina,” gets a little too close to the ’90s for comfort, sounding baldly built on the template of “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” But if that sounds like a step in the right direction of decades to you, there’s a lot to savor in an album that starts with “Go (Carnaval de Luz),” which was purportedly inspired by Suicide but sounds like a punkier version of techno-“Pop,” and ends with a duet with a country legend, “Torn,” with Dolly Parton — in, yes, her last recorded song — taking the place of “Zooropa’s” Johnny Cash.
The band is delightfully locked in in this, their 50th anniversary. But the ultimate success of the album will depend on how down you are with Bono at his most unbottled. I groaned a little at “You and me are breaking news / Because the news can’t break us” (in “Superficiality”), but found myself as touched as I was meant to be when Bono speaks up for every human on earth when he sings “No such thing as a small life… / Every life gigantic, huge and romantic / Even greater than it appears” (in “If the World Is at War We Better Not Be”).
It’s best to save all the tissues, in any case, for the Dolly duet, which she began writing as a song about a love triangle, before Bono retrofitted it into a ballad about a mother grieved by the division between two warring sons. Captured in the studio just three months shy of being on her deathbed, Parton does some actual belting in the final moments of “Torn,” and Bono is there to meet her, in a flawless blending of voices. Suddenly, thoughts about U2’s relevance seem irrelevant; whether it’s with a final Dolly collab or Bono’s stanza-by-stanza musings, no one does mortal reckonings better.
