Happy 30th Anniversary/Birthday today to U2s 4th studio album The Unforgettable Fire (Released 1st October 1984) - Video below has the complete album in full + B-Sides. - The Unforgettable Fire is the 4th studio album by U2. It was released in October 1st 1984. The band wanted a different musical direction following the harder-hitting rock of their 1983 album War. They employed Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois to produce and assist them experiment with a more ambient and abstract sound. The resulting change in direction was at the time the bands most dramatic. Recording began in May 1984 at Slane Castle, where the band lived, wrote, and recorded to find new inspiration. The album was completed in August 1984 at Windmill Lane Studios. It features atmospheric sounds and lyrics that lead vocalist Bono describes as sketches. Two songs feature lyrical tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. - Pride (In The Name of Love) and MLK. The Unforgettable Fire received generally favourable reviews from critics and produced the bands biggest hit at the time, Pride (In the Name of Love), as well as the live favourite Bad, a song about heroin addiction. A 25th Anniversary edition of the album was released in October 2009. The title is a reference to The Unforgettable Fire - an art exhibit about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The band saw the exhibit in November 1983 in Japan while on the War Tour. Upon its release, reviews were generally favorable: Paul Du Noyer of NME praised the album and the new Eno, Lanois production team. The review said: The old four-square rock unit has been deconstructed. In its place theres a panoramic soundscape, multiple textures, subtle shifts in emphasis. Adam Sweeting of Melody Maker wrote a mostly favourable review, saying, The Unforgettable Fire is the other side of the coin from War. Where the latter opened with the shattering paramilitary drumbeat of Sunday Bloody Sunday,... Fire launches into the long shimmer of A Sort Of Homecoming, whose sort-of-mystical lyric adorns the romantic maroon-and-gold sleeve. The fact is, if you bring your established conception of U2 to this record, youll be disappointed. Tony Fletcher of Jamming! said it was not an album full of hits. [It is however] a forceful collection of atmospheric ideas and themes, forgettable at first but strangely haunting and soon firmly implanted. Fletcher added that Enos production removed some of the heavy metal from U2 and replaced emotion [as] the driving force. Hot Press hailed the arrival of producer Brian Eno as a bold move. Reviewer Liam Mackey said that the album was rich and rewarding. Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone gave the album a score of 3/5 stars, compared to the 4/5 stars given to the two previous releases, Under a Blood Red Sky and War. In the review, Loder said that with The Unforgettable Fire, U2 flickers and nearly fades, its fire banked by a misconceived production strategy and occasional interludes of soggy, songless self-indulgence. This is not a bad album, but neither is it the irrefutable beauty the bands fans anticipated. Retrospectively, Bill Graham of Hot Press wrote in 1996 that The Unforgettable Fire was U2s most pivotal album and that it was their coming of age that saved their lives as a creative unit. Niall Stokes, also of Hot Press, said that one or two tracks were undercooked due to the deadline crush but that it was the groups first album with a cohesive sound on which U2 were reborn. This was the first album I really got into, remarked Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy. I love the sound: apart from Pride, all of it is very blurred - a bit impressionistic. All the textures are obviously very Eno-inspired. ~ Thomas
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 11:03:40 +0000
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