There's something both refreshingly rewarding and painstakingly burdensome about being one of the world's greatest living rock bands. Complete control and total autonomy are things many bands hope for but only the best achieve, while the pressures of continually outdoing oneself and raising the bar increasingly higher is a challenging prospect. In the circus that is today's pop landscape, you're only as good as your last record. Everything else is but a memory.

U2 has been arguably the strongest presence in rock music for the better part of 20 years, and the band never once faltered in its efforts toward living up to the title. More than mere rock stars, the band members are the closest thing popular music has seen to rock gods since the Beatles, possessing something utterly magical and inescapable, and yet at the same time indefinable.

The 2000 record All That You Can't Leave Behind was clearly indicative of a band reminiscent of its late '80s heyday and the first U2 record that failed to shatter new ground. Instead, the album was a trip down memory lane, a rigid and conservative one in comparison to the band's previous records.

Four years later, U2 strikes again with How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, a record that again finds the band clinging on to the '80s like an infant to a security blanket.

Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. U2 circa 1987 represents one of the greatest rock 'n' roll acts of all time, and if there's any era in the band's history worth recapturing, the band has surely found the pick of the litter. But to revert back to those glory days twice in a row is a stretch, enough so to cause alarm in the hearts and minds of diehard U2 fans who yearn for the thrill of the chase provided by the group's past albums. Has U2's creative tank alas run empty?

Not in the slightest. While the band's sense of adventure appears to be waning, Atomic Bomb is still a fundamentally solid rock record. Within are all the classic ingredients for a solid U2 album. There's the catchy single (the fabulously electric "Vertigo"), the densely emotional pop-rock ballad ("One Step Closer") and of course the epic ("Yahweh"). While these are the pinnacle tracks, solid cuts such as "Love and Peace or Else" and "Crumbs From Your Table" hold it together in the middle.

The record also marks the band's most consistent group effort to date. For years, it's been the Bono and Edge show, with bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. filling in the gaps. But here it's a four-man show with each member taking center stage.

It's a bold statement whenever a band says it is tired of leading the pack and would prefer instead to just hang back and rock out, and that's precisely what U2 is doing here. The record speaks of a band with nothing left to prove, one completely in its element. Atomic Bomb isn't a landmark record, but when you've already got as many as U2, who cares?

Grade: B

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on Dec. 2 2004.