This album marks a transitional stage for U2 from their earlier sound towards the big stadium rock. It has a certain New Wave feel, close to Echo and the Bunnymen and their ilk, but while McCulloch and co went darker still with their album (the previous one in this list), U2 take the post-punk sound and make it a little bit bigger. There’s still a strong emphasis on drums (Larry Mullen Jr) and bass (Adam Clayton), but The Edge’s guitar is rising in prominence.
Probably their biggest track from this album, Sunday Bloody Sunday references an incident in 1972 where British soldiers fired upon unarmed protestors in Belfast, killing 12 and injuring more. This fuelled much of the ongoing violence of the Troubles, and it wasn’t until 2010 that the Saville Report (begun in 1998) finally stated that the British soldiers were at fault. PM David Cameron formally apologised, but no prosecutions succeeded against the soldiers (so far...). The track has a very military drumbeat and seems oddly subdued for U2 compared to later efforts. To my mind, however, this makes it more powerful and it lives alongside Dylan’s Masters of War, Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, and Peter Gabriel’s Biko as a protest song laced through with simmering anger.
Seconds has a similar military feel, this one about imminent nuclear war, giving the album its title and loose theme. Although New Years Day is nominally about the Polish Solidarnsoc movement, led by Lech Walesa, which was the core of a growing resistance to the Soviet Union in Warsaw Pact countries, this isn’t overtly reflected in the lyrics which are a loose merging of a love song and a paeon to freedom.
There are traces in the musical DNA on this album of the U2 of Joshua Tree and beyond, but there are also parts that feel unique to this album, like the extended heavy drumming section towards the end of Like a Song, or the trumpet parts and very Queen-like chorus of “Love love (love love love)” on Red Light. For that, I rather like it – my recollection is that U2 went a bit repetitive for a while, every track sounding like a pastiche of a U2 track, and Bono going a bit too far up his own arse for his own good. I suspect this isn’t their only entry on the list so it’ll be fun to find out if my suspicions / recollections are founded or not.
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