U2 - Blow Your House Down - Non-Album Tracks (1990-1991)

I think a key reason that most U2 albums have been so successful both critically and commercially is that the band usually recorded enough songs for two albums, and then selected their favorites for just one album, leaving the rest to be B-sides and bonus tracks and the like. That's especially the case for one of their most celebrated albums, 1991's "Achtung Baby." They wrote enough music for three additional albums of outtakes, at least. There are so many extra songs that I was able to make two albums of stray tracks out of them, with this being the first one. Yet I was still able to some quality control and not include the ones I considered weak.

U2 had a problem with "Achtung Baby," because bootleg recordings of their album sessions were made public even before the album was released. A lot of those recordings were early versions of songs that ended up on "Achtung Baby" or its follow-up, "Zooropa." Sometimes, they took bits and pieces from some songs that didn't make the album and incorporated them into songs that did. You can hear some instances of that here if you listen carefully. In particular, "Down All the Days" has a lot in common with "Numb" on "Zooropa," even though it has totally different lyrics and many other differences.

U2 made a significant change to their sound for "Achtung Baby." The first sign of that new sound was a cover of the Cole Porter song "Night and Day," released in 1990. So this album naturally starts off with that. After that, to be honest, most of the best remaining songs wound up either as B-sides or bonus tracks when a deluxe version of the album came out many years later. The rest of this album is mostly bonus tracks, and the next one will mostly consist of B-sides. But there are some unreleased songs on both. This one has two, "Doctor Doctor" and "Back Mask," In terms of sound quality, they sound as good as the rest.

This album is relatively short, at 38 minutes. The next one that finishes off the "Achtung Baby" era is almost as short. I could have easily made both albums longer, since there are lots of unreleased songs I didn't include. But I wanted to keep the quality control level high. Those other songs pretty much remained unreleased for a good reason, in my opinion. The band did a lot of experimenting, and had many dead ends as well as winners. But the outtakes from this era are a confusing mess. If you think I've missed some good ones, let me know which ones and I'll possibly reconsider.

By the way, I think all the songs are U2 originals, except for "Night and Day" which I mentioned above as a Cole Porter song, and "Everybody Loves a Winner," which was a soul hit for William Bell in the 1960s.

01 Night and Day (U2)
02 Blow Your House Down (U2)
03 Down All the Days [Early Version of 'Numb'] (U2)
04 Heaven and Hell (U2)
05 Oh Berlin (U2)
06 Everybody Loves a Winner (U2 & Maria McKee)
07 Doctor Doctor (U2)
08 Back Mask (U2)
09 Near the Island [Instrumental] (U2)

https://www.imagenetz.de/fPBt3

U2 got very artistic for their album covers in their "Achtung Baby" era. That's tough to convincingly replicate. So instead of trying to come up with something from scratch, in this case, I just used the covers to one of their singles. This is the "Mysterious Ways" cover. The only change I made was to replace the title "Mysterious Ways" with my own title, using the same font and angle.