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Upon first listen, No Line on the Horizon seems as if it would be a classic grower, an album that makes sense with repeated spins, but that repetition only makes the album more elusive, revealing not that U2 went into the studio with a dense, complicated blueprint, but rather, they had no plan at all.
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A person of a certain disposition might feel the will to live seeping from them at the very thought of a U2 song called Cedars of Lebanon, but it turns out to be one of the album's biggest successes: a beautiful, downbeat coda to a confused and confusing album, one that can't decide whether it's ironic or sincere, experimental or straight-forward, and instead attempts to be all things to all people, with inevitably mixed results.
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Such is the album as a whole: a compromise between the experimental and the pedestrian that makes for an excursion almost as tricky as walking a tightrope stretched between two distant towers.
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At the end of the day, No Line on the Horizon is an easy album to dismiss and an even harder disc to love, and some people will be ready to call it a masterpiece just as others are ready to deem it an outright failure.
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U2 might try to pass Horizon off as atmospheric, but it's really just a grab bag of underdeveloped ideas that never seemed to command the band's full attention.
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Unfortunately, too much of NLOTH sounds staid and uninspired, again maybe due to the changing musical landscape that was going on all around them during the making of the record.
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For the lovers, this patchy album offering moderate advance on its immediate predecessors will probably suffice. But in truth it's an unmitigated failure to reconcile the sound of their past with a cohesive vision of their future.
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The album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 324 out of 409
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Mixed: 42 out of 409
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Negative: 43 out of 409
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Jun 4, 2013
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Jun 25, 2012
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Sep 2, 2010