Pop rocks

U2, Bowie, and Depeche Mode ahead

by Brett Milano

The album is called Pop, but the single is called "Discotheque." Is U2 sending out mixed musical signals? For the second season in a row the big news is the prospect of a new U2 album, but this time it's for real, and the new disc is set for release by Island on March 4.

The finished album is apparently quite different from the one U2 would have put out if they'd met last month's release date. Their original goal was to make a guitar-heavy "rock and roll" album, and it appears that was still the plan until recently. But U2's collective interest in dance music apparently took over late in the sessions, as they and producer Flood began remixing and retooling the material they'd been working on. "Trip-hop" is now the word that Bono and the Edge have used to describe the album while mentioning their admiration for the Chemical Brothers, Tricky, and Oasis.

The "Discotheque" single is due to hit the radio on January 8. Meanwhile, two brief samples from the album (both lifted from a Europe-only Island promo video) started to circulate on the Internet last month. Although they were reportedly taken off line after the band's management complained, it took me only 20 minutes of Net surfing to find them on a Norwegian fan's page. The 20 seconds' worth of "Discotheque" I downloaded sounds more hard funk than disco, with the Edge playing a chunky dance riff that harks back to Chic's heyday as Bono does an eerie overdub of falsetto vocals à la "The Fly." The other track, "Wake Up Dead Man," is more traditional U2 and a grabber even in lo-fi computerized form. The sample is a soaring chorus hook that's answered by a simple-but-perfect 12-string guitar part. Both clips suggest more of a guitar-band format than advance word has indicated.

Another veteran about to release new music is David Bowie, whose Earthling (Virgin) will appear on February 11. Bowie's material has also previewed over the Internet, though in his case it was authorized. The single "Telling Lies" hit the Net in September and three different mixes have been released since then, though the song is still unavailable as a single or CD. The song promises a more conventional dance-rock sound than the adventurous but badly received Outside.

Singer David Gahan's well-reported misadventures have kept Depeche Mode out of the studio for a time, and those misadventures are reported to be the topic of the group's forthcoming single from Sire, "Barrel of a Gun." Yes, the title is a heroin metaphor. The next Mode album is said to sport a harder technoid sound than usual, though they've put down the guitars and returned to an all-synth format.

A handful of long-standing alterna-rock heroes are due to show up in new configurations next year. Having disbanded American Music Club, frontman Mark Eitzel has hooked up with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck for his second solo effort, which is now being recorded for Warner Bros. The two have written most of the material together. J Mascis's next album, Year of Mondays (Reprise; due March 25), will mark the debut of a new Dinosaur Jr line-up, including a string quartet. Mascis's former bandmate, Lou Barlow, releases a full-length Folk Implosion album, Dare To Be Surprised (Communion), in mid April.

The new year's first true anthem will likely arrive in the form of "The Masses Are Asses," a killer track from L7's The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum (Reprise, February 6). The album shows L7 in full-throttle arena-rock mode. Also promising big noises are Offspring, whose Columbia debut, Ixnay on the Hombre (February 4), opens with a spoken "disclaimer" by Jello Biafra.

Two of the more interesting labelmates due for new music are Morphine and Henry Rollins, both newly signed to Dreamworks. Morphine's Like Swimming makes no sellout moves in terms of style or production but does sport a stronger batch of tunes than the previous album, yes. Following up the commercial success of 1994's Weight, Rollins and company have used an outside producer (Steven Thompson) for the first time. The new material "sounds like the last album, only better," said Rollins when I interviewed him last summer. "The big difference is that Melvin [Gibbs, bass] is more integrated into the band. There's no eight-minute epics on this one, sorry to say. Sometimes I listen back to that End of Silence-era stuff and it's all eight minutes, nine minutes . . . my God, what were we thinking?" The still untitled album will be out in late March.

The U2 tracks mentioned here can be heard at http://www.sover.net/~carrieu2/u2page.html.