U2
The Unforgettable Fire

Talking about a band like U2 is always challenging. Praised and criticized at the same time due to various factors, the only path to judge them is to adhere to the sole musical truth. In the group's most successful works, content and music have become one. It is also difficult to try to separate these two aspects. After the group's naturally youthful phase, the pinnacle of which is "War" that consecrated them to worldwide attention, this perfect fusion of soul and music materializes in this fourth album.

"Unforgettable Fire" is a complex work, but one of the most accomplished by the Dublin group. Turning to Brian Eno for production demonstrates U2's desire to renew themselves, to break free from a musical formula that with "War" had already borne its greatest fruit. One could say that U2 wanted to partly abandon the direct and accusatory tone of the previous album, shifting towards a more poetic approach to music and lyrics. They realized that, while not renouncing their commitment at all, it could be expressed in a more veiled; and even more romantic way. What is "The Unforgettable Fire" about? Answering this question and talking about the album is the same thing: It is the great existential questions that dominate the work.

The opening is entrusted to "A Sort of Homecoming", where Bono's voice is one with the phrases he utters, and dominates a rhythm of immense expressiveness; the images of the wind, the storm, and the snowy fields are images of the mind. The homecoming of the title means many things: rediscovering childhood innocence, a more sincere world, a lost love... it is remarkable U2's ability to never fall into rhetoric and the already heard. If we wanted to find a flaw in the album, perhaps it is its overly decisive idealism manifested in the celebration of Martin Luther King, entrusted to what is perhaps the emblematic track of the album: "Pride (In the Name of Love)" represents the main path of U2's musical epic. But ideals are often not true art: in fact, the strengths of the album are to be found elsewhere; we must read "Pride" in the context of the album as an important but not necessary piece. After it, in fact, "Wire" returns to tackle existential themes, in this case, drug addiction. A tumultuous and suffocating track, it paves the way for one of the album's peaks: "Keep going, don't look back, because I am here"... The title track of the album, "the unforgettable fire", is the synthesis of the soul of the work. Never regret what we have believed in even if they tell us we have failed. But any description of the meaning of the tracks is perhaps useless in the face of the pure poetry of "Promenade". The expressive power of this piece is devastating. The unforgettable fire is also this: "Slide projection, seashore city, Coca Cola, football, radio radio"... the simplicity of small things.

But "The Unforgettable Fire" is above all an album about redemption: after the brief instrumental interlude of "4th of July", we reach the true pinnacle of the album, that "Bad" destined to become one of their favorite pieces in live performances. Simply "Male" is the literal translation of "Bad". Yet the translation that perhaps comes closest to the spirit of the piece is "Ruin". It is not just a track about drugs; it is much more. In its images of sleepless nights, metropolitan nightmares, abandoned factories, there is perhaps the synthesis of everything that disturbs our lives... perhaps few tracks have depicted the dramas of contemporary life like "Bad". All supported by a musicality that transmits a mix of epic and dramatic. But with "Bad" redemption is completed, and the album can now slide, exhausted, towards the conclusion. Two more tracks, perhaps of lesser importance like the long ride of "Elvis Presley and America", and the concluding and liberating rain of "MLK" which seals a work perhaps not perfect, but of undeniable poetic and expressive power.