New U2 album boasts epic melodies, but few surprises

For more than two decades, Irish rockers U2 have made a ritual of mapping out different musical trails for themselves with each new album, sometimes with mixed success, but always sounding fresh and reinvigorated by the journey.

That’s no small task for a band formed in the late 1970s, its members now in their mid-40s, most with families in tow, and with years of commercial and critical success having already assured them a perch in rock ‘n’ roll history.

And so with that, on their latest album, “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb” (Interscope), U2 appears to be happy retracing familiar territory, delivering a reliable trove of bright, soaring anthems riding on echoey, wall-of-sound guitars and plaintive musings on war, love, death, and God — but few surprises.

“How To …” is not the collection of raw, driving punk rock the first single, “Vertigo,” sampled in those ubiquitous ads for Apple Computer Inc.’s digital music player, might suggest. The follow-up to 2001’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” which also saw the band scale back somewhat its 1990s-era albums’ flirtation with dance beats and flashier soundscapes, “How To …” instead mostly highlights U2’s big and earnest 1980’s guitar-and-bass driven sound.

That’ll be good news for many fans, not so for others who might have been looking for another wholesale musical makeover on U2’s part.

The band — singer Bono, guitarist The Edge, drummer Larry Mullen Jr., bassist Adam Clayton — might have set out to do just that. They brought in a cadre of producers, including Chris Thomas, who worked with the likes of the Sex Pistols and Roxy Music, but eventually asked Steve Lillywhite, who helped steer their first three albums, to take them across the finish line.

For an album billed as being all about The Edge, the innovative guitarist never seems to really break out or make a statement beyond guitar solos, which he’s done in the past.

The title of the album is a bit of a decoy. The songs are not whimsical, nor full of the anger and pitched political statements found in the group’s early work.

This time out, Bono, who recorded the album in between his much-publicized globe-trotting to lobby for poverty and AIDS relief in Africa, brought those issues with him into the studio and tackles them more directly than ever before.

The soaring melodies on “Bomb” sometimes reveal Bono’s vocal range is not what it used to be when he belted the high notes in his 20s. But overall the renewed emphasis on anthems suits the material and makes for the most vivid and passionate U2 album since 1990’s masterful “Achtung Baby.”