On Days Of Ash, the standout is “The Tears Of Things,” which connects to songs like “Until The End Of The World,” “The Wanderer,” and “Wake Up Dead Man” as a scripture-rooted dialogue on the tenuousness of moral clarity in an amoral world, this time pertaining to the war in Gaza. Structured almost like a folk song, with a steady acoustic strum accented by those surging arpeggios from The Edge, “The Tears Of Things” deals more in questions than answers, assessing the cycle of redemption and revenge recurring throughout history with a proper sense of grief and horror. It’s “protest” music, I suppose, though it doesn’t fit the easy partisan categorizations that these times demand. To me that’s one of its strengths. I dare say that it’s, at least, a borderline great U2 song, which is infinitely more than I expected when I saw that cover.