'No Line on the Horizon' by U2

U2

No Line on the Horizon

Interscope

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When he was 20, Brian Eno scribbled a phrase in a notebook that later proved relevant to his entire career: "The edges around nothing." As the writer and Roxy Music biographer Michael Bracewell has noted, the approach Eno would develop in that band and as a mastermind of art rock centers on devising formulas that "reconfigure subject, concept, material, purpose and process" -- methods for drawing lines around the "nothing" experience of random sound or half-formed self-expression and giving it meaning. Or, to put it another way, tools for finding lines on the horizon.

A decade later, teenage guitarist David Evans developed a nickname -- the Edge. It suited the sound he was creating with the band he'd signed on to for life. U2, like its eventual producer Eno, always has approached rock as a tradition worth honoring through acts of reconfiguration and renewal; Roxy Music, in an early song, dubbed this process "Re-Make/Re-Model." Or, to put it another way: Draw new lines on the horizon.

U2 has become such an edifice in pop that it's hard to remember its emergence at the dawn of the 1980s, startling our ears with guitar drone, delay and those slightly stoned yet bracingly direct rhythms, topped by the unhinged yelp of Bono, a born believer following Ezra Pound's modernist dictum to "Make it new!"

From the first, U2 was more fervently reckless than any classic rock band yet more respectful of its roots and determined to be part of a lineage than the art punks with whom they'd started out.

The sound the band hit upon, which became transcendent on the mid-period albums Eno co-produced, is big enough to contain rock's historical essence and overshadow it. "No Line on the Horizon," which is due out next week and currently is available for streaming on the band's MySpace page, celebrates, dissects, reconfigures and sometimes pokes holes in that sound.

The band's 12th studio album, it comes 30 years after those first face-slapping singles. It's a pilgrimage -- the religious metaphor is inevitable -- along the path forged by U2 itself.

The title track starts things out and shows the road. One of seven not only produced but also co-written by Eno and fellow senior team member Danny Lanois, it's built on a multilayered drone that recalls the peers of U2's youth, especially Echo and the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, when psychedelia went post-punk.