My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (6) The Joshua Tree - U2

[This is the fifth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

U2 have always been searchers. Reviews of the band's albums, positive and negative alike, tend to touch on the sense of yearning that pervades the music. It's likely this very restlessness that lends the group its defining peculiarity: no band has ever put out so many great albums without producing any back-to-back. The Joshua Tree is the quintessential U2 album, not because it's definitively their best - Achtung Baby is at least as good - but because it features the band distilling this essence most successfully. The Unforgettable Fire sessions had expanded U2's palate, but most of the resulting music suffered from a lack of structure. Rattle and Hum, meanwhile, featured a bombast that lands on the album's anthemic highlights, but otherwise comes off as obnoxious. The Joshua Tree sharpens the atmospherics of its predecessor while withholding on self-indulgence just enough to almost never become unctuous [1]. Each band member gets a showcase: Bono sings to rafters on "Red Hill Mining Town," Adam Clayton's groove sets the album in motion on "Where the Streets Have No Name," and Larry Mullen Jr.'s thunderous drumming is the high point of "Bullet the Blue Sky." The Edge, meanwhile, dominates The Joshua Tree. The shimmering arpeggios of "Where the Streets Have No Name" were expressly designed to be the ultimate U2 riff, and the claim has stood the test of eight subsequent albums. He almost single-handedly provides the songs with their atmospheres, summoning dread on "Exit," rapture on "Trip Through Your Wires," and (naturally) yearning on "With or Without You" - a song prudently chosen as the lead single, and one that ultimately couldn't help but become the band's signature composition. It was perfectly in character for Bono to announce "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," but The Joshua Tree represents perhaps the only time that U2 ever did just that. Fortunately for everyone else, it wasn't long before they felt compelled to return once more to the drawing board.