Library Rock's Backpages

U2: Achtung Baby

David Cavanagh, Select, January 1992

CONFUSION REIGNS. What Is their trip? Achtung Baby sounds very 1991, but only as the most tangential of bulletins from four musicians who've been holed up in a foreign country, gleaning their information from fuzzy postcards and radios with bad reception. No matter what the terrain, no matter what the beef, no matter what the hell Massive Attack are rumoured to have planned for the re-mixes, when U2 get together to play on Achtung Baby — guitars, bass and drums— they're a dark, angular and moody little operation, and these 55 minutes paint a strange, alluring picture of a band out of focus.

Total word count of piece: 584

Subscribe

Becoming a member is easy. Membership gives you access to all the thousands of articles in the library.

Click here to go to Subscribe page.

Click here for academic and other group subscriptions.