U2 - Best Of 1980-1990 (98)

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01 - Pride (In The Name Of Love)
02 - New Year's Day
03 - With Or Without You
04 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
05 - Sunday Bloody Sunday
06 – Bad
07 - Where The Streets Have No Name
08 - I Will Follow
09 - The Unforgettable Fire
10 - Sweetest Thing
11 – Desire
12 - When Love Comes To Town
13 - Angel Of Harlem
14 - All I Want Is You

U2 - Joshua Tree (87)

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1 Where the Streets Have No Name
2 I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
3 With or Without You
4 Bullet the Blue Sky
5 Running to Stand Still
6 Red Hill Mining Town
7 In God's Country
8 Trip Through Your Wires
9 One Tree Hill
10 Exit
11 Mothers of the Disappeared

Using the textured sonics of The Unforgettable Fire as a basis, U2 expanded those innovations by scaling back the songs to a personal setting and adding a grittier attack for its follow-up, The Joshua Tree.

It's a move that returns them to the sweeping, anthemic rock of War, but if War was an exploding political bomb, The Joshua Tree is a journey through its aftermath, trying to find sense and hope in the desperation. That means that even the anthems — the epic opener "Where the Streets Have No Name," the yearning "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" — have seeds of doubt within their soaring choruses, and those fears take root throughout the album, whether it's in the mournful sliding acoustic guitars of "Running to Stand Still," the surging "One Tree Hill," or the hypnotic elegy "Mothers of the Disappeared."

So it might seem a little ironic that U2 became superstars on the back of such a dark record, but their focus has never been clearer, nor has their music been catchier, than on The Joshua Tree.

Unexpectedly, U2 have also tempered their textural post-punk with American influences.

Not only are Bono's lyrics obsessed with America, but country and blues influences are heard throughout the record, and instead of using these as roots, they're used as ways to add texture to the music. With the uniformly excellent songs — only the clumsy, heavy rock and portentous lyrics of "Bullet the Blue Sky" fall flat — the result is a powerful, uncompromising record that became a hit due to its vision and its melody.

Never before have U2's big messages sounded so direct and personal.

U2 - Achtung Baby (91)

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1 Zoo Station
2 Even Better Than the Real Thing
3 One
4 Until the End of the World
5 Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses
6 So Cruel
7 The Fly
8 Mysterious Ways
9 Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World
10 Ultra Violet (Light My Way)
11 Acrobat
12 Love Is Blindness

Reinventions rarely come as thorough and effective as Achtung Baby, an album that completely changed U2's sound and style.

The crashing, unrecognizable distorted guitars that open "Zoo Station" are a clear signal that U2 have traded their Americana pretensions for postmodern, contemporary European music.

Drawing equally from Bowie's electronic, avant-garde explorations of the late '70s and the neo-psychedelic sounds of the thriving rave and Madchester club scenes of early-'90s England, Achtung Baby sounds vibrant and endlessly inventive.

Unlike their inspirations, U2 rarely experiment with song structures over the course of the album.

Instead, they use the thick dance beats, swirling guitars, layers of effects, and found sounds to break traditional songs out of their constraints, revealing the tortured emotional core of their songs with the hyper-loaded arrangements.

In such a dense musical setting, it isn't surprising that U2 have abandoned the political for the personal on Achtung Baby, since the music, even with its inviting rhythms, is more introspective than anthemic.

Bono has never been as emotionally naked as he is on Achtung Baby, creating a feverish nightmare of broken hearts and desperate loneliness; unlike other U2 albums, it's filled with sexual imagery, much of it quite disturbing, and it ends on a disquieting note.

Few bands as far into their career as U2 have recorded an album as adventurous or fulfilled their ambitions quite as successfully as they do on Achtung Baby, and the result is arguably their best album.

U2 - Boy (80)

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1 I Will Follow 3:36
2 Twilight 4:22
3 An Cat Dubh 6:21
4 Into the Heart 1:53
5 Out of Control 4:13
6 Stories for Boys 3:02
7 The Ocean 1:34
8 A Day Without Me 3:14
9 Another Time, Another Place 4:34
10 The Electric Co. 4:48
11 Shadows and Tall Trees 4:36

From the outset, U2 went for the big message — every song on their debut album Boy sounds huge, with oceans of processed guitars cascading around Bono's impassioned wail.

It was an inspired combination of large, stadium-rock beats and post-punk textures. Without the Edge's echoed, ringing guitar, U2 would have sounded like a traditional hard rock band, since the rhythm section and Bono treat each song as an anthem.

Of course, that's the charm of Boy: all of its emotions are on the surface, delivered with optimistic, youthful self-belief, yet the unusual, distinctive guitar textures give it an unexpected tension that makes it an exhilarating debut.

The songs may occasionally show some weakness — the driving "I Will Follow," the dark "An Cat Dubh," and the shimmering "The Ocean" stand out among the sonic textures — yet the band's musical and lyrical vision keep Boy compelling until the finish.

U2 - Rattle and Hum (88)

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1 Helter Skelter [live]
2 Van Diemen's Land
3 Desire
4 Hawkmoon 269
5 All Along the Watchtower [live]
6 I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking 7 For [live]
8 Freedom for My People
9 Silver and Gold [live]
10 Pride (In the Name of Love) [live]
11 Angel of Harlem
12 Love Rescue Me
13 When Love Comes to Town
14 Heartland
15 God, Pt. 2
16 The Star Spangled Banner
17 Bullet the Blue Sky [live]
18 All I Want Is You

Functioning as both the soundtrack to the group's disastrous feature-film documentary and as a tentative follow-up to their career-making blockbuster, Rattle and Hum is all over the place.

The live cuts lack the revelatory power of Under a Blood Red Sky and are undercut by heavy-handed performances and Bono's embarrassing stage patter; prefacing a leaden cover of "Helter Skelter" with "This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles, and now we're stealing it back" is bad enough, but it pales next to Bono's exhortation "OK, Edge, play the blues!" on the worthy, decidedly unbluesy "Silver and Gold."

Both comments reveal more than they intend — throughout the album, U2 sound paralyzed by their new status as "rock's most important band."

They react by attempting to boost their classic rock credibility.

They embrace American roots rock, something they ignored before.

Occasionally, these experiments work: "Desire" has an intoxicating Bo Diddley beat, "Angel of Harlem" is a punchy, sunny Stax-soul tribute, "When Loves Come to Town" is an endearingly awkward blues duet with B.B. King, and the Dylan collaboration "Love Rescue Me" is an overlooked minor bluesy gem.

However, these get swallowed up in the bluster of the live tracks, the misguided gospel interpretation of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and the shameful answer to John Lennon's searing confession "God," "God, Pt. 2."

A couple of affecting laments — the cascading "All I Want Is You" and "Heartland," which sounds like a Joshua Tree outtake — do slip out underneath the posturing, but Rattle and Hum is by far the least-focused record U2 ever made, and it's little wonder that they retreated for three years after its release to rethink their whole approach.