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Mar 21, 2023U2 deliver smooth, polished performances that are handsome and, yes, intimate but not especially compelling. It's stylish background music that sounds a bit like it was designed to be heard in chain coffeehouses during the late 2000s.
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Mar 20, 2023It makes sense with the book on your lap, but otherwise, the album may not convince. The acoustics are peculiar on tracks like Pride and the vocal mic seems compressed, rather than expansive. Something to do with surrender, perhaps. What remains of it, when you give yourself away. [May 2023, p.80]
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Mar 20, 2023There is disappointment that a number of U2’s big-hitters don’t translate well on ‘Stories For Surrender’, but this revision hasn’t been a totally fruitless endeavour: you just have to dig a little bit deeper to find the reimagined material that’s truly worth savouring.
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Mar 16, 2023Neither a disaster on the level of their iTunes launch, nor a triumph to match Zoo TV, Songs of Surrender sits somewhere in the middle of that sliding scale of success.
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Mar 21, 2023Nothing here is unforgettable or in danger of replacing its original. The arrangements are formulaic, regressing back to the stripped-down candlelit era of the original MTV’s Unplugged. At worst, Songs of Surrender is an overindulgence. At best, it’s a pleasant interlude.
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Mar 22, 2023The biggest issue with Songs of Surrender is that U2 often fail to be malleable enough to truly stretch their wings and radically reshape these tracks. They too often, to their detriment, play it safe.
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Mar 17, 2023“Songs of Surrender” is the weightier project. Like all of U2’s albums, it’s anything but casual; the songs have been minutely reconsidered. ... But for most of “Songs of Surrender,” less is simply less. What comes across throughout the 40 songs is not intimacy, but distance: the inescapable fact that these songs are being rethought and revived years later, not created anew. Wild original impulses have been replaced by latter-day self-consciousness.
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Mar 16, 2023The resulting unwieldy quadruple album manages to be overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.
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Mar 15, 2023Their sense of surprise was exchanged for maddeningly consistent predictability. We are left with Songs of Surrender, a quadruple album that sounds exactly how you think it would.
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Mar 16, 2023Ultimately this is an album of shadow versions that leave you yearning for originals.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 20
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Mixed: 4 out of 20
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Negative: 7 out of 20
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Aug 13, 2023
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Jun 15, 2023
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May 8, 2023