U2 – ‘Carnaval de Luz’ review: brighter, poppier and still a little bit bombastic

It has been a decade since U2 last released a record of all-new material, but Bono is still Bono. Even a cursory listen to his band’s sixteenth studio album ‘Carnaval De Luz’ will put to bed any suspicions that he might be moving past his penchant for lyrical grandiosity as he reaches his mid-sixties. Across 12 tracks, he finds majesty in the mundane (‘La Reina’), writes about love with a religious fervour (‘Glorify’), compares Rosalía to the Catholic patron saint of music (‘The Mirror Maker’) and makes his obligatory call for peace among men (‘If The World Is at War We Better Not Be’).

None of this is atypical of latter-day U2, where uninspiring instrumentals and platitudinous turns of phrase often leave their records feeling bombastic and hollow, but ‘Carnaval De Luz’ feels like a left turn, summoning a joy that both reinvigorates their songwriting and serves as a riposte to an ever-bleaker global picture. The group have revived both ‘The Joshua Tree’ and ‘Achtung Baby’ onstage in recent years and there are stirring nods to both, the former in The Edge’s trademark soaring guitars on ‘Streets Of Dreams’ and the outstanding ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’, and the latter in the stomping strut of ‘La Reina’ and ‘Silencio’.

Then, there’s the exploration of what feels like new territory; there’s a clutch of out-and-out pop songs here that are disarming in their simplicity. There’s ‘Superficiality’, a groovy foray into disco that Sparks might’ve written. ’Glorify’, meanwhile, quietly flirts with gospel, while ‘Midnight Sunshine’ sounds off the cuff, laid-back, everything revolving around the melody. Subtlety has never been U2’s stock in trade, to put it mildly, but here, it suits them.

Not everything works as well as those moments. Strangely, given how long they’ve been missing in action, they don’t always put their best foot forwards; opener ‘Go (Carnaval De Luz)’ is weirdly thin; its guitars a pale shadow of what will follow. ‘Can’t Stop Us Now’ is one more standard issue stadium anthem than the record needed, and while the recent loss of Dolly Parton imbues album closer ‘Torn’ with added poignancy – her vocals being the last she ever recorded – it closes an otherwise vivacious record in sagging, strangely downbeat fashion. Up until this point, the album has fizzed along with genuinely crackling energy, with Bono frequently at his most ecstatically evangelical; the change in tone is whiplash-inducing.

And it’s Bono that everything comes back to. He always talks a good game; he does not always deliver. Here, his lyrics are unusually nuanced, even if he still fails to curb his more bombastic impulses; there remain plenty of melodramatic lines that invite bemused chin-stroking, like ‘Can’t Stop Us Now’’s “all of us are better than any of us”. Still, ‘Carnaval De Luz’ delivers on the lightness of touch that its title promises; for the first time in a long time, U2 sound more playful than preachy.

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