U2 Get On Your Boots Single Review
Bono & Co Preview 'No Line On The Horizon' With New Electro Track
Jan 20, 2009
U2 has enjoyed a long and fructuous career, highlighted by the brilliance of The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby and its spin-off Zooropa.
Along the way, U2 earned the title of the biggest band in the world. Then there was the disastrous Pop, followed by the much acclaimed All That You Can Leave Behind, and the misconstrued How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Through it all, the Irish rockers have embraced mood rock, new rave and seminal dance.
Their latest offering, "Get On Your Boots", originally penciled in for a February 15 drop, has had radio stations buzzing since it first aired on January 19, 2009 with a worldwide simultaneous release. The new song, however, straddles the fence somewhere between Achtung Baby and Pop.
Get On Your Boots and Escape
Music magazines have dubbed the new U2 song a return to form and a gripping rocker in the same vein as "Vertigo". While the song does begin with a power riff courtesy of the Edge, flawless vocal from Bono, slabs of synths and some talk about the new world order, something about these three and a half minutes has a strange feel of familiar and uncomfortable.
The biggest oddity comes from Bono’s singing approach. It sounds like he's imitating the talk/sing style of "Wild, Wild West", a novelty hit for The Escape Club in 1988. Listening to Bono rhyme off the lyrics "You free me from the dark dream / Candy floss ice cream / All our kids are screaming / But the ghosts aren't real," sounds rather like the method The Escape Club chanted "Mandy's in the backroom handing out valium/ sheriff's on the airwaves talking to the D.J.'s / Forty seven heartbeats beating like a drum / got to live it up live it up/ Ronnie's got a new gun" from their late eighties number one.
After the talk of dark dreams and even a reference to Satan, Bono belts "Sexy boots" before remerging as international man of philanthropy with the lines, "I got a submarine /You got gasoline/ I don't want to talk about wars between nations".
Given the frequent changes in tempo and the bizarre lyrics it’s unclear what the song means. Is “Get On Your Boots” about laying down the guns and then laying down? Women's liberation? The Gaza Strip or the Vegas Strip? And does it all really matter?
No Line On The Horizon
As buzz of a new record began to surface, Bono stressed that when production had ceased on No Line on the Horizon, he felt disappointed and so delayed the album until the new batch of songs counted amongst their most diverse and sonically experimental. "Get On Your Boots," flirts with electronica and buzz guitar, but in the end, the track still sounds like U2 - for better or worse.
"Get On Your Boots" doesn't really live up to the hype. It's a great U2 record, and that's better than half the songs now spinning at radio, but it still pales in comparison to other U2 experiments such as "Mysterious Ways" or even "Zooropa". But if it is any indication of the weirdness of the parent record, there should be lots of surprises on …the horizon.
"Get On Your Boots" was written by U2 and produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. The song gets its official release on16 February 2009 but is available now on the US and Canadian iTunes stores as part of a pre-sale download.
U2’s No Line On the Horizon is scheduled for release on March 3, 2009.
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