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U2 reinvent themselves again, says reviewer... again...
NBR's David Cohen has been looking at the previous reviews of U2s recorded output. He found some intriguing similarities.

According to the Herald’s review of the group’s latest album, No Line On The Horizon, U2 has finally broken with its “safe and predictable” sound. Best not to get “too comfy” with the new album, reviewer Scott Kara warned last Thursday, “because delve deeper and it reveals itself as the most radical U2 album in years - perhaps ever.”

Delve a little deeper into the Herald archives, though, and something else is revealed: a startlingly similar critical take on the group’s last big-ticket album, How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, which was also hailed as something that “goes from being just another think-big U2 album to something great.”

But wait. So, too, it appears — at least in the Herald’s view — did the band’s album before that, All That You Can Leave Behind (“the first proper U2 album in years”), which also apparently saw the group having “figured out how to write songs again, and how to grow old gracefully.”

...Rewinding again through the paper’s review archives, to 1991, and another, eerily similar critical verdict was passed on the band’s album of the time, Achtung Baby, with the review serving notice that “while U2 were in the studio working on this radically altered album the number one rule was no songs that sound like U2 songs, please. Well, they succeeded.”

But U2 also succeeded in shucking off the U2 sound with their earlier album, The Joshua Tree, as well, according to another Herald review published at the time of its release, in 1987, which declared Joshua Tree to be, first and foremost, an album that “doesn’t sound like U2."

Read it in full here