The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by Cliff Hicks (@Devinoch) for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!

Unless you're one of the very few artists who thrive on constant reinvention (that would be David Bowie, The Beatles and Prince), it's hard to take everything people know and love about your band and just jettison it in an attempt to find something entirely new, but that's just what U2 did over the nearly year long process it took to reinvent themselves on Achtung Baby, still the band's finest album.

Before Achtung Baby, U2 had just come off of a very long worldwide tour supporting 1987's The Joshua Tree, which had turned into a concert film and mostly live album, Rattle and Hum. By the end of 1989, the band was damn near on the verge of a breakup. The impending divorce between guitarist Dave "The Edge" Evans and his wife wasn't making things any easier, either. The band was unsatisfied creatively, sick of playing "the old hits" over and over again, and longed for something radical, something new.

The band decamped and headed to Berlin, at Hansa Studios, very near the remnants of the newly torn down Berlin Wall. They had hoped to be inspired by the reunification of Germany, but instead were greeted with a blisteringly cold winter and gloom nearly everywhere they turned. They decided to envelope themselves in European music, and drown themselves in as many new sounds as they could get their hands on.

The Edge was listening to things like Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM, while drummer Larry Mullen Jr. was listening to old school rock like Cream and Jimi Hendrix. Bono couldn't seem to find words he wanted to say, and bassist Adam Clayton got so frustrated with Bono at one point that he shoved his bass in Bono's face and told him to play it himself. The band was in serious danger of imploding, and was talking about breaking up.

Then, near their breaking point, a song began to emerge, the basic roots that would eventually grow up to become "One." The band decamped for Christmas, went back to Dublin, mended their fences with each other and listened to what they'd actually recorded in their first pass in Berlin. They found... it was a lot better than they remembered.

In February, the band regrouped in Dublin to continue recording, rejoined by producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Eno, in particular, thought the band was too close to what they'd recorded in Berlin, and told the band not to consider anything precious. The Dublin studio was just a short walk from both Bono and The Edge's respective homes, and being on their home turf let the band relax and discover themselves.

Achtung Baby is such a radical departure from their existing material, many fans were dramatically taken off guard by the first single, "The Fly," with its shock of squanky guitar and treated/processed drums, that they didn't know what to make of it. Me, I fell in love on the spot., as Bono's voice began to whisper through the compressed filter, establishing his Fly persona, the first of several identities that would be tied to Achtung Baby, the Zoo TV tour, and Zooropa, the follow up album that was originally just supposed to be an EP, but the band found themselves too productive to quit.

The new sound was a veritable blender of all the things U2 had been listening to and absorbing for the last year, some of that classic drum beat from Cream/Hendrix, the distorted guitars from My Bloody Valentine and Chapterhouse, disco rhythms from Bowie, European dance beats from KMFDM, all layers above and below Bono's career-best lyrics, some of his most personal and introspective writing he'd ever done. ("Love Is Blindness" is reportedly about The Edge's divorce, "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?" was a song the band didn't think was finished and yet went on to be a smash single, several of the songs were about Bono's newly born daughter.)

There's two camps of people when it comes to U2. The people who think The Joshua Tree is the band's best, and the rest of us, who rightly know that Achtung Baby is about as perfect a rock record as anyone's gonna get.

(Oh, and to the crazy people who've used "One" as a wedding march song, I can tell you only what Bono's said about that: "It's not that kinda love song.")

-- Cliff Hicks (@Devinoch)