The more they change, the more they stay the same. Even as the enormodomes get bigger, the globe-straddling tours more preposterously staged, and Bono's role as people's president less and less incongruous, U2 remain - miraculously, really - that post-punk band from Dublin with the aspiration to the epic and the funny guitar sound.
Disc One of this compilation gathers together highlights from U2's second full decade, and Disc Two features a selection of remixes and b-sides. You can quibble with some of the selections, or the disappointing three track, one trailer DVD, but the music is almost uniformly great. Which is some achievement for a rock band; by now, they're supposed to be irrelevant, right?
Perhaps Bono's politicking has helped U2 remain a meaningful band. Certainly, their 'importance' in this phase of their career eclipses that of their first decade. They keep pushing new and interesting musical buttons, and they keep on writing songs that continue to hit the mark. But they have a way of touching people, of connecting, that is beyond the majority of their peers.
If the '80s saw U2 trying to understand America, all the better to conquer it, the '90s seem to have been about documenting a Europe haemorrhaging internally, lost amid the despair of the dashing of dreams. The thing that many doubters hate most about U2 - the lyrical ambiguity, the everyman posturing - mean that these songs actually mean more than they appear at face value. 'Miss Sarajevo' speaks powerfully to this wounded, confused continent, and there are other echoes of a decade of turmoil in songs like 'The First Time', the beautiful 'Electrical Storm', and even 'Discotheque'.
As the '90s began Europe still gleamed with new opportunities and naive innocence, and U2 warned of the cloying hand of globalisation by fetishising the Trabant. 'Even Better Than The Real Thing' says it all, though nobody realised it at the time. And they careened into the millennium with their raucous punk side to the fore, 'Beautiful Day' shining but also seething. 'The Hands That Built America' speaks again of the dynamic that exists between the old world and the new, but with new information, new attitudes at their disposal.
Whatever U2 are doing in 2010, it will be worth hearing.
by Angus Batey