Formed in Dublin, Ireland in 1976, U2 is one of most popular rock outfits in history, with their blockbuster record being “The Joshua Tree” in 1987 which has roughly 25 million sales. U2 has continued their greatly successful career, releasing four more records with over ten million sales and another four with over one million. Even after fifty years of work, U2 still continues to release new music, their most recent being the extended play, or EP, Easter Lily.
U2 maintains the same lineup they have had for almost the entirety of their career: vocalist and primary lyricist Paul Hewson, known professionally as Bono; guitarist David Evans, known professionally as The Edge; bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr.
“Easter Lily” has six tracks, totaling 32 minutes, and includes “Song For Hal,” “In A Life,” “Scars,” “Resurrection Song,” “Easter Parade” and “COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?).”
“Song For Hal” is, for the most part, a standard U2 track aside from one major aspect: vocals. Instead of the job being done by main vocalist Bono, The Edge fulfills the role and certainly performs to par. Although their styles do differ slightly, they are of very comparable quality.
Just from this first track, it is clear that U2 has maintained its iconic style of composition. Minimalist yet moving guitar pieces, emotional lyrics with spirited delivery, light drumming and a bass inaudibly playing rhythm come together into three to six tracks.
“In A Life,” is, well, pretty good. Especially when the track hits its chorus, “In A Life” is able to capture the energy conveyed by older, better U2 songs, unlike the rest of the EP.
The track “Scars” focuses on self acceptance, with lyrics reading “It’s your scars that give you beauty / You’re a beauty / Don’t cover your scars / Don’t cover your scars… they’re your scars.” However any meaning can only be gleaned from retrospectively reading the lyrics, as “Scars” marks a major problem with the EP: The tracks blend heavily with one another and similar style and lyrics make them indistinguishable from each other.
“Resurrection Song” and “Easter Parade” feel generic. They inspire no emotion or feeling of any kind, leading to a period of time that just felt blank. So blank, in fact, that despite listening to every track on this EP four or five times, I couldn’t describe any details of these tracks no matter how hard I tried.
“COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?)” is an anti-war pop-rock song that is effectively trying to say killing each other is mean and we should just be nice to everyone. It’s a nice sentiment, but simply isn’t how the world works. If one seeks to espouse political stances through music, do so through intelligent lyrics delivered with either solemnity or rage, not naive writing and subpar vocals.
An example of a much better anti-war song would be “1916” by Motörhead, which tells the story of the 16-year-old boys who shipped out to fight in World War I. The song is entirely structured around conveyance of its core message, the fast hard rock style of traditional Motörhead songs is traded for a slow, almost march-like sounds of a cello and military snare drum.
Not only that but Motörhead’s singer Lemmy Kilmister delivers the poignant lyrics he penned in a soft and mournful tone, adding significantly to the weight of the track as he describes the march to war of 10,000 soldiers and their eventual deaths where they are subsequently forgotten by the world at large.
Although both tracks discuss a similar theme of war, one is a brutal depiction of it, which needs to do no more than illustrate the realities of its subject while the other is little more than preaching about nothing of substance.
This EP was never going to be groundbreaking, but on top of that, it’s fairly uninspiring and generally uninteresting. Overall I’d give it a four out of ten. The listening experience wasn’t unpleasant but it certainly wasn’t entertaining either. The EP gave me two and a half hours of blank listening which quickly morphed into three or four hours of me struggling to find anything — positive or negative — to say.
