U2: How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb

It starts off with the high-altitude blast of Vertigo. It ends with Yaweh, a song that's basically a chat with the man upstairs. He probably appreciates the gesture better than all those pop singers always thanking him for the nice awards.

Anyway, as those titles suggest the 11th U2 studio album does come with familiar lofty ambitions from go to whoa.

Coming off 2001's All That You Can't Leave Behind, it's perhaps to be expected. That album reconnected them with an audience which they had spent most of the 90s confusing with irony, self-awareness and gentle experimentation which went downhill after 1991's Achtung Baby.

This one takes up the previous one's baton, attaches a big flag to it and waves it about in the spotlight just in case you think the predecessor lacked for enough of U2's typical extravagantly heroic gestures.

Yes, All That You Can't Leave Behind might have sounded like U2 quite enjoying sounding like U2 again after years in denial. While on How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb they're positively rejoicing in it.

Though - and here's where

... Atomic Bomb goes from being just another think-big U2 album to something great - it's got a bruised soul and musical grit beneath all the grandeur and global vision.

Yes, there are songs which address God, the plight of the Third World (Crumbs From Your Table), and plead for an end to war (Love and Peace or Else). And very good they are, too, though you do worry that Bono must save his best turns of phrase for his speaking engagements in his other job as rock's smartest emissary.

But what makes this engage something other than your cigarette lighter-waving arm, is the songs where the personal seeps through the rattle and hum.

That's strongest on Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, a song on which Bono addresses his late father and which the band played at the funeral. It's as beguiling and touching as their earlier ballad One. Lyrically it works just as meaningfully on an autobiographical or universal level, and that strange sound at the 3.20 mark, when it explodes into a wide-screen? The sound of your heartstrings getting a good plucking.

It's also aiming at the heart rather than the head on the likes of the soul-shaped Original of the Species and One Step Closer on which Bono does his Stars in Their Eyes-quality Lou Reed once again.

The other predominant feature of

... Atomic Bomb is how much detonation it gets from the guitar work of the man they call the Edge, who seems to have regained some of his.

His trademark echo unit might once again be set to "Grand Canyon" but he knows where his volume knob is, too. That makes for thrilling riff-work, right from the aforementioned Vertigo, through the glamrock fuzz'n'blues of Love and Peace or Else and the hydraulic stomp of All Because of You.

Yes, it can sometimes sound like something they prepared earlier - Miracle Drug's opening sounds like With or Without You while City of Blinding Lights might also be the place Where the Streets Have No Name. And a few choruses don't resound as melodically as their delivery hopes they should.

But that doesn't stop ... Atomic Bomb being a more exciting album than you'll ever hear from a band this big, this far down the line.