SOE
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U2 - The Blackout
 Album:
Songs Of Experience (2017)
  1. Originally posted by LikeASong:[..]
    This is much less U2-ish and much more commercial-garbage-like than Invisible though. You can read on Twitter and Facebook that loads of young fans from garbage bands are liking it!
    Bowie lost his integrity in the 80's (more precisely: after the first 3 tracks of Let's dance) and until the last track of the Never let me down album.

    U2 seem on track to lose their integrity in their late 50's!


  2. They won't release it like this. I believe this was a way to declare they are ready to go and give us something, but silence at beginning and end, crowd noise, quality on purpose to deter downloading...

    I'm still skeptical if this ends up on album or if its an Invisible track....
  3. Originally posted by LikeASong:[..]
    This is much less U2-ish and much more commercial-garbage-like than Invisible though. You can read on Twitter and Facebook that loads of young fans from garbage bands are liking it!


    Is this a joke?
  4. Originally posted by u2_michaelc:[..]
    No need to compare with shifty swifty, U2 have fans and people who know what real music is...12/14 year olds can listen to Beyonce and all that shit. The charts is full of propaganda...sexing up children ,stealing the innocence of children..another argument for another time. But U2 are better than anything the charts suggest.


  6. Originally posted by dieder:This new song is fucking awesome. Far better than GOYB or Miracle. Raw sounding, bit Editors like, relevant lyrics...


    But better live. Saw Editors live last year and they were majorly disappointing.


  7. So what if it is? Fair play to her.

    How is that a bad thing? Amra is one of the kindest people i've ever had the pleasure of meeting. Keep the snidey comments to yourself.
  8. Originally posted by scarletoak:[..]
    So they are promoting it to the world on Facebook with an annoying sound stream? Why would they make that mistake? I don't hear any compression.
    1. apparently...
    2. I don't think it is a mistake:
    a) People either assume correctly that decent audio will be released on cd, or they just don't hear it.
    b) They do this because it is designed to sound good on smartphone and tablet - I bet this is how most people have taken in yesterday's stream
    3. See 2a Sorry, but it is just massively there - compare, for instance, this spectrogram of cd audio* (the more blue you see, the less compression there is - and compression here means "sound squeezed together"):


    Not only can you see that the dynamic range is much wider (or "higher"), but you can also see that the orange is more brighter and there is more vertical blue as in the Blackout stream:



    Please note the dark part above the 16K mark (that means there is no sound there: that's an effect of the mp3 compression - that's (amongst some other things!) what they mean with lossy btw...)

    *What you see is Big Girls are Best from the 2001 French limited edition (how geek is that )
  9. Originally posted by JuJuman:[..]
    Glad to see I'm in good company :-).

    It isn't a bad song. But the production doesn't really help.

    As always, I think they should stop trying to be relevant, and focus on the music. They'll never ever be as relevant again as they used to. Taylor Swift's latest single (good, but not her best) has now 90M (the official video) + 50M (the lyrics video) views on youtube. U2's standing realistically stands in the region of 1/100th of those numbers or so.


    "They should stop trying to be relevant" just quit then. Do you realize what you just said?
  10. I still find it funny that people seemingly think U2 is putting out music that they hate for the sake of trying to be "relevant". U2 isn't being told what kind of music to make by anyone.

    Has it ever occurred to you that those two things:
    -music they want to make for the sake of music
    -music that attempts to be commercially successful

    are both the same thing to U2? Fuck I'm sick of hearing this. They aren't some garage indie band who shirks success and wants nothing to do with it, they've never been that band. They've done music for art's sake, it's called Passengers, and some of the band themselves have gone on record saying it was a mistake.
  11. Indeed. Great music and commercial music don't have to be mutually exclusive. e.g. Daft Punk's Get Lucky was equally great and massively commercial.
  12. BBC mini review

    BBC music reporter Mark Savage said: "U2 have been busy touring their 1987 classic The Joshua Tree this summer, and some of that album’s magic seems to have rubbed off on their new song. Recorded live in Amsterdam, The Blackout finds the band sounding more vital and forceful than they have since releasing Vertigo way back in 2004.

    Lyrically, though, it’s not as sure-footed as you’d expect. Bono seems to have re-written Paul Simon’s 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover by way of the apocalypse, with clunky lines like: “Democracy is flat on its back, Jack / We had it all, and what we had is not coming back, Zack”.

    His overall message – “we can find light in the darkness” – is more platitude than polemic; but maybe that’s where the Bono of 2017 differs from the angry young man who wrote Sunday, Bloody Sunday or The Joshua Tree’s Bullet The Blue Sky. He’s called the new U2 album Songs of Experience, after all.