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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 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 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 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 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 Wild original impulses have been replaced by latter-day self-consciousness.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 17, 2023Erasing the muscular power of an amplified rock combo, Edge explores ways to let other elements shine. In particular, the focus is on Bono’s older yet still powerful voice, devoid of posturing and mannerisms, really digging into meaning and melody. The subtle rumble of Adam Clayton’s bass and tastefully executed percussion from Larry Mullen Jr make themselves felt in all the right places, with full band arrangements breathing new life into a smattering of undernourished songs.
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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 16, 2023It’s a touching journey reflecting on how the four boys changed into men and changed the world through the power of music at the same time.
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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 16, 2023Ultimately this is an album of shadow versions that leave you yearning for originals.
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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 14, 2023If their creative missteps in the past two decades have generally been caused by their twin determinations to keep up with modern pop and relentlessly pursue music that works in stadia, then here they’ve cut themselves free from all of that. Ultimately, it may be a watershed moment. By stripping it all back down, in some ways, they’re bigger. [Apr 2023, p.84]
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Mar 14, 2023On Songs of Surrender, he reminds you these are sturdy songs that can be rethought without any sonic window dressing.
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UncutMar 14, 2023The highlights are splendid: a brass-embellished "Red Hill Mining Town", a languid piano-led "Beautiful Day", a near-calypso "Miracle of Joey Ramone". [Apr 2023, p.38]
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