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U2 is a political band, but for a long time, it has acted on a middle of the road, "everyone can agree on this issue" platform - the kind of faux-inspirational work that will get people to donate to the Red Cross (which the band promoted Thursday in the wake of Hurricane Harvey) rather than to a Houston food bank or Texas organizations. While U2's music, stage show, and video work were objectively great and well-done, the band was at its best when it broke loose and really got political. A long clip of hitchhikers walking a desert road backed "Where the Streets Have No Name." Shots of Native Americans, Southwestern landscapes, and Joshua trees loomed over the audience. Behind each "Joshua Tree" track, videos created by Dutch filmmaker Anton Corbijn explored the album's Americana themes. And the band was dwarfed by a 200 foot by 45 foot screen (made up of 1,040 individual panels).
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"Big" might be the appropriate all-around term for the show. Following a lengthy, 15-song set, the band came back out for an energetic six-song encore, including "Vertigo," "Elevation," and "One." Out on a 30th anniversary tour for its iconic "Joshua Tree" record, the band ripped through four big tracks - opening with "Sunday Bloody Sunday" no less - before launching into the album. There's a reason the band can pack out Buffalo's New Era Field: U2 delivers a show that's tight, deep, and outright impressive. Of course, I know the band and its music - and I understand the band's massive relevance in rock history - but until Tuesday night, I'd never fully grasped what a powerhouse it is still. Whatever you think, with all the hat-wearing imitators that followed in its wake, it is a landmark work and the band's view is still remarkable, ambitious, naïve, gauche, straight-faced, epic, flawed, and luminous.I underestimated U2. In its variety of formats (the boxed double CD/DVD hard backed book looks a first edition of something like The Rights Of Man by Thomas Paine), this is a sparklingly remastered 20th birthday present to the album the group will never be able to escape. It's always been the scope and scale of U2's visions that dazzle. "Red Hill Mining Town" is, for this listener, the most poignant statement, as, in the middle of this American odyssey, they wrote a fairly unambiguous song about the personal cost of the miner’s strike that tore British communities apart in 1984/85. When the 'and you give yourself away' section explodes, it was like a metaphor for what was about to happen to their career. The third track (and lead single), "With Or Without You", is the unique selling point of the album it brings together the threads of the album's openers "Where The Streets Have No Name", and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and demonstrates quite how capable as a group they had become. The fact that they were working out of Ireland made it to be a far more balanced account of the failings and successes of the New World. The America of U2's The Joshua Tree is the one the group surveyed through their tourbus window as they built and cemented their reputation throughout the early 80s. It takes an outsider's eye to unpack and commentate on the idiosyncrasies of a country. Aware of the platform that they now had, the band crafted away with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois to make an album that was sonically unified, emotionally intelligent and commercially sound. The Joshua Tree, first released in March 1987, capitalized perfectly on U2's startling appearance at Live Aid almost two years previously.