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No Line on the Horizon by U2 Interscope Records, March 2009 $8.99

"Time is irrelevant, it's not linear," Bono proclaims near the beginning of No Line on the Horizon (4 stars), U2's 12th studio album, which releases March 3 but is already posted on the band's MySpace page. When you've spent 30 years in the circus, are well into middle age, and are still working the territory most commonly associated with preening 20-year-olds, it's a reasonable stance to take. Fittingly, it's a preoccupation Bono circles back to again and again, and it results in the band's most thematically rich album in a storied career.

First, the bad news. Produced by the now-familiar triumvirate of Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Steve Lillywhite, and recorded in studios around the world (Dublin, London, New York, and Fez, Morocco), Horizon occasionally suffers from sonic jetlag. It gives the impression that it has been painstakingly pieced together rather than allowed to flow organically. Not so much played as sculpted, the 11 songs exhibit the slick, professional sheen that sometimes inhibits a band once known for its raw punk energy.

But it's a quibble. No Line on the Horizon is not the band's best album, nor is it the radical reinvention that Bono announced in countless pre-release interviews. It's nothing more and nothing less than quintessential U2, full of the searing, echo-drenched guitar riffs and rousing sing-along choruses that have always marked the band's best work. And as a compendium of the sounds that have defined U2, it's an encyclopedia three decades in the making.

The first four tracks throw down the gauntlet. On the opening title track, Bono offers a typical open-ended assessment of commitment, both marital and spiritual, that works as a straightforward love song and a commentary on the vagaries of the divine courtship. Backed by the Edge's surging, propulsive rhythm guitar, he sings of a love that is equally sensuous and mysterious, one that cannot be pinned down and categorized. The exquisite "Magnificent" is the band's most transparent worship song since its very early days (and 1981's "Gloria"), a soaring hymn of praise that rockets forward on Edge's churning riff and Bono's crazed choirboy tenor:

I was born to sing for you
I didn't have a choice but to lift you up …
Only love can leave such a mark
Only love can heal such a scar

On the seven-minute "Moment of Surrender," arguably the album's central track, Bono returns to the power-ballad format that propelled classics such as "One" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." It's old-fashioned, heart-on-the-sleeve emoting, full of righteous passion and gospel melismas, and it's Horizon's strongest track. "Unknown Caller" is something else entirely, a jittery, paranoid rocker featuring a shouted chorus that is sure to be a fist-pumping concert favorite. Taken together, these four songs make up the strongest opening gambit the band has played since AchtungBaby, and they offer positive proof that the grizzled geezers still have plenty left in the tank.

Even more impressively, Bono (with help from Lanois and Eno this time — a first) writes some of his most thoughtful and introspective lyrics, and he explores themes that are expanded on and developed from song to song. There are the usual "is it Jesus or a girlfriend?" teases, but those looking for more depth will find much to savor. This is an album all about time: the ravages of the inexorable march of hours and days, chronos and kairos, calendar time and clock time vs. those moments that are out of time, that sustain us, those in which we encounter something of the Divine. It's a theme explored explicitly in "Moment of Surrender" and "Unknown Caller," and obliquely in later tracks such as the anthemic rocker "Breathe" and the atmospheric closer, "Cedars of Lebanon."

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February (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53