U2
Days of Ash EP

The current problem with U2 is that it’s no longer clear how sincere they are. In 2017, they rushed the release of Songs of Experience because they felt an urge to speak out against newly elected Donald Trump, particularly with Get Out of Your Own Way. A song built on nursery rhyme lyrics and musically among the worst moments of their career. If it hadn’t been presented as an anti-Trump manifesto, probably no one would have cared about it.

Today, the four from Dublin seem once again to feel obliged to intervene in the complex international situation, releasing this EP whose lyrics touch, in turn, on the war in Ukraine, Trump’s America, Palestine, and Iran (finally!). Messages for the most part unarguable and, precisely for this reason, perfectly aligned with the sentiment of the moment. And here’s the doubt: how much of this is genuine artistic urgency and how much is mere positioning?

The real problem, however, is the music. This work too fails to escape that embarrassing downward drift that began around the year 2000. Bono fills the songs with endless lyrics — hey Mr. Hewson, these are U2, not Bono & His Band — and often creates emotional short-circuits: dramatic lyrics are paired with plastic pop tunes (Song of the Future), which end up canceling each other out.

The EP gets off to a bad start with American Obituary, yet another clichéd misfire, and ends even worse with Yours Eternally, where the band ends up sounding like Coldplay, who themselves became famous by sounding like U2 from the 2000s.

In this downward slide into the abyss, there’s only a timid moment of recovery, One Life at a Time, in which faint traces of their old inspiration resurface.

In the end, Days of Ash remains little more than a clever crowd-pleaser: nothing to do with the fury of War!, a lot to share with the mainstream.