The heart is a bloom, shoots up through the stony ground

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

11/03/01 : All That You Can't Leave Behind - U2

Our eighth visit with them Irish funsters, bringing them level with Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Neil Young and Manic Street Preachers - and this is one I own taking us to eleven for the year. And I remember loving it in places, without that affection being transferred to the album as a whole, so it will be interesting to see what I think of it now. 

Actually, it's not bad at all - it's a bit of a "back to basics" effort after the nonsense with Zooropa (which I actually quite liked) and Pop (which I didn't). It starts very strongly with "Beautiful Day", "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of", "Elevation" and "Walk On" (which were the four singles released from the album) and, whilst I'd struggle to say it maintains the quality level throughout, it doesn't descend into dross. My main niggles would be that the tunes often feel like they've been specifically written for the Match Of The Day Highlights reel ("give us more swirl, Edge!") and sometimes the lyrics aren't always exactly great ("a mole, digging in a hole" and "In New York, summers get hot" jumped out at me). But overall, this feels like it's got a decent set of tunes which display enough variety that I feel I should have listened to it more at the time.

We're at #6 in the charts this week on their nineteenth week of a decent 66 week run, with it having debuted at #1 - interestingly it started 1-4-10-20 and spent the next seven weeks in the 20s before slowing climbing back up to #3 in its eighteenth week. The top five this week were Dido, Eva Cassidy, Coldplay, David Gray and Anastacia and the highest new entry was Eric Clapton (#7 - I can't say I'm sad to have missed that). 

Wikipedia tells us this is their tenth album, and it was produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Larois who also produced The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby - which I would say have a strong argument to be their best three. There's an awful lot of text there (271 milliPeppers) but it tells us very little other than it took them a long time to pull together, with work starting in late '98 for the album to come out in late '00 - getting back to basics is a tricky business, you know. Critically, the reviews were pretty good with a general consensus that they'd stopped pissing about and things were much improved as a result - although the album and singles won SEVEN Grammy awards across a couple of years, which feels like overkill to me. Commercially, it did really well globally getting to #1 pretty much everywhere (although only #3 in the US) selling twelve million copies globally, which is pretty impressive.

Because there's so many copies about, discogs.com tells us this is a fifty pence album but if you want a sealed 20th Anniversary Super Deluxe Box Edition which contains seven albums and five 12" singles then it's going to set you back - wait for it, £1,302.84. Which is, to no-one's surprise, the most expensive album of the year because that's a whole load of cash! And whilst I'd struggle to say it's worth that much, it's certainly worth the princely sum of fifty pence - this was a much better album than I remembered.

18/03/01 - Better than it might have been