by Collin Souter

First of all, I still stand by every word of my review of last Saturday’s show. The band just didn’t have the spark that they’ve always been known for and I walked away feeling slightly disenchanted with the whole thing.

Tonight, I walked in, left my personal BS at the door, my annoyance with U2’s aggressive marketing campaign and cleared my mind of any negative reactions I had from last Saturday. I needed to re-assess this tour before I wrote it off as a re-hash of Elevation and every other old U2 trick in the book. There must be a good reason they played that Arcade Fire song (“Wake Up”) before they came out on stage. A second helping was in order and I managed to score GA tickets at the last minute.

And boy am I glad I did!

It would appear on the surface that U2 simply remade the Elevation Tour, but that only covers the design angle. The Elevation Tour was all about the band coming back to its audience and saying, “Not to worry. We weren’t about to get all Rick Wakeman on you. We’re still at the top of our game and it feels great. Let’s party!” The Vertigo Tour has a different, more urgent and—for Bono—more personal approach. This may be the most personal U2 tour yet, which should come as no surprise considering the content of the album.

With City of Blinding Lights opening the show (as it should), it puts Love and Peace in its rightful spot. Love and Peace may be a better song, but Blinding Lights works much, much better as an opener and gets this show off the ground in spectacular fashion.

Putting Love and Peace in the middle gives the show a more cohesive arch, one that seemed to be missing on Saturday. U2 didn’t work in those songs from the Boy album (An Cat Dubh/Into the Heart, Electric Co.) just to shake things up. It’s part of the journey from boyhood into adulthood. The coupling of Miracle Drug and Sometimes You Can’t Make It depicts the sense of immortality one feels when watching a loved one die. With that sense of immortality (and the death itself) comes clarity and a need to vindicate one’s existence, thus begins Bono’s need for “Release” through a naïve cry for Love and Peace. Sunday, Bullet/When Johnny Comes Marching Home and Running to Stand Still represent the harsh backdrop for this fight for change. Pride serves as the peaceful war cry, Streets as the personal spiritual belief that guides one’s soul to do what he/she must do and One serves as a means to have the audience join in on this fight (“We get to carry each other”).

It would also appear that by re-hashing the Zoo TV graphics that the band has run out of ideas and that they’re shamelessly revisiting their glorious past. Not so. What inspired Zoo TV? In part, the Gulf War on CNN. Where are we now? Iraq. Who’s in charge? Bush’s Baby. By having the Zooropa Baby screaming “Mama! Mama!” before the band takes the stage for this Achtung Baby threesome (Mysterious Ways thrown in for good crowd-pleasing measure), the band acknowledges that many of their fans have grown up and had kids of their own since the days of Zoo TV and the first Gulf War. The world hasn’t changed much. A song like The Fly shouldn’t be relevant anymore, but it remains so. This is the world they’re entering into. It’s no secret.

All Because of You and Yahweh bring it back full circle (if you take the interpretation of “You” being God). Closing with “40” may be an obvious prayer, but it still works.

That’s not necessarily how it went tonight, but that’s just my interpretation for any other show that follows this set list. Take it for what it’s worth.

Again, I still stand by what I said about Saturday. Sunday, New Years Day and Pride lack freshness and sound like old standards played for the sake of it. But they help make the statements U2 wants to make and they’re not going to win the crowd’s enthusiasm with Please, Staring at the Sun or Dirty Day. So be it. Miracle Drug is this tour’s Stuck in a Moment, the one song that just doesn’t do it for me. Sometimes You Can’t Make It picks up where Kite left off and finishes the job.

In simpler review terms, tonight’s show was simply fantastic, the U2 I’ve always known. The Vertigo lights that circled the entire stadium (not just the stage) seemed to make the show more inclusive for the audience. It being Bono’s birthday, the feeling of spontaneity never ceased. At one point during Into the Heart, Bono brought a young boy on stage and took a walk around the ellipse with him. Bono also brought a girl on stage to dance with him during Mysterious Ways and invited another girl in stage to play Party Girl. The band bravely closed the show with another rendition of Vertigo instead of “40,” but I would have preferred the latter.

The band also thankfully dropped Yahweh (a song that makes me want to kick my own vomit across the room) in favor of the far superior Original of the Species. It retains every ounce of passion as what you hear on the album. (My apologies to anyone on any message board that goes by the name of yahwehfan).

In spite of my gripes about the lack of freshness in some of the songs on the Vertigo tour, I am now convinced that it is a BETTER tour than Elevation. It may not be groundbreaking. It may not be original. But take another look at that set list and compare it to almost any Elevation set list of your choice. I know which one I’d rather take. The one with more substance.

Color me a born-again fan. Happy birthday Bono and thanks for the gifts.

And what about that Arcade Fire song? It’s called “Wake Up,” and if you’re curious, here are the lyrics. http://www.arcadefire.com/flashy/lyrics.html

(PS—The album is called Funeral. Own it)

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