The Rewind Button is a group blogging project that I’m participating in. We’re taking on Rolling Stone‘s Top 40 albums of all time and writing our own reviews of them.

Much like their two-syllable name, there are two sides to U2. On one side is the bombastic rock stars who crave the applause from hundreds of thousands of people on their feet in an arena. On the other side is an Irish band happy to sing songs of the people and be rewarded with nothing more than free drinks for the night.

It’s with The Joshua Tree that U2 finally managed to integrate these two sides into a fully formed artistic achievement. The album on a whole is very representative of their goal to capture the spirit of America, primarily its open lands. On the album’s first side (and I encourage you to listen to it on vinyl), U2 belts the listener with brashness and bravado. But it’s the album’s second side that interests me the most, because it sounds more tame, more introspective. When one goes to the desert, thoughts of chest puffing don’t come to mind. The thoughts are more inward, philosophical and based in survival.

I haven’t listened to this album in years before reviewing it for this project. I’m happy to say that I still feel the same way I did in 1987, that the album’s second side has more cohesion and captures the album’s goal better than the first side. That said, I will never turn off “With or Without You” when it plays on the radio, and I will always recite alongside Bono when he says “One hundred, two hundred…” from “Bullet the Blue Sky.” But give me “Red Hill Mining Town” over “Where the Streets Have No Name” any day.

I’m looking forward to the end of this project when I can rearrange the top 40 list to my liking. The Joshua Tree will definitively be in the top 15, maybe even the top 10.

Please visit these other blogs participating in The Rewind Button project: