**** (Four stars out of 5)
By Neil McCormick, music critic, The Telegraph
U2's 14th studio album opens with one of the most vulnerable and fragile songs of their 41-year-career. Love Is All We Have Left swells on trembling strings and synths, with Bono's close, cracked vocal blending into digital auto-tune as he conjures a space age lullaby for an impending apocalypse. "This is no time not to be alive," he sings.
It's a short, strange, sparse vignette, its spectral beauty interrupted by a gnarly distorted guitar riff as the veteran band turn on the power, and roll exultantly into Lights of Home, a chunky anthem brushing off near-death experience ("I shouldn't be here cos I should be dead") to reach for the light at the end of the tunnel. "Free yourself to be yourself," choral voices command in a coda purpose built for mass singalongs. This is surely closer to the idea that most listeners have of U2 as an upbeat, inspirational, anthemic rock band. And Songs of Experience is full of such moments: big meaty hooks matched by singalong aphorisms ("Get out of your own way!" "Love is bigger than anything in its way"). But the sound of a man in conflict and crisis also runs through the centre of this highly personal collection of songs, undercutting and ultimately deepening the spirit of can do positivity.