March 11, 1987
With none of the ballyhoo that usually heralds the arrival of Really Important Rock Records, Irish quartet U2 today quietly released The Joshua Tree, its fourth (fifth, if you count 1984's live set, Under A Blood Red Sky) and by far most accomplished album.
The Joshua Tree, produced by Canadian Dan Lanois and British art rock auteur Brian Eno, represents the full flowering of this long-promising and occasionally effulgent ensemble. If it's not among the three most popular and best-selling albums of the year, I can't wait for what's to come.
Where U2 once was vague and obtuse, it is now specific and precise, both lyrically and musically. Having reached pop music's swirling, stellar zone via three quite original albums and hundreds of fiery performances that have nevertheless aimed only generally at the objects of this band's commitment and scrutiny, U2 has finally zeroed in on its targets on The Joshua Tree. It has owned up.
This isn't just a potent statement of faith in some abstract humanist notion. These songs name names and put adult hearts on the line.
The Joshua Tree, accompanied by a stark, black-and-white photo of the band bleakly profiled against a New Mexico desert background, is very much an American album. If it's true that U2 has inherited the soaring, romantic spirit of Ireland's great metaphysical poets, the band has, like many of its literary and musical ancestors, discovered in America a steely edge on which to hone itself. Somewhere in the dry heart of America, U2's lyricist/singer Bono Vox, still stretched between the fire of damnation and the cool water of salvation, has found his voice.
The key, the "tree of pain" alluded to in the the album's title, is "Bullet The Blue Sky", possibly the most powerful condemnation of American imperialism commited to vinyl. So succinct is its imagery, so distilled is Vox' adoration/abhorrence of American culture and politics, and so searing is guitarist The Edge's slide accompaniment, that this one song defies us to leave it alone. It worries, like an incurable sore, till we scratch it by listening again and again.
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