U2

U2

If "The Fly" winked its compound eyes at megalomania magnified by media overkill, U2's Achtung Baby Super Deluxe Edition bottles that excess. Expanded onto 10 discs, a 6-CD/4-DVD LP-sized box with filler like 12-inch postcards, the album might not even warrant the baseline 2-CD version. After all, 1993's Zooropa, included here, pooled Achtung Baby's runoff during the ensuing Zoo TV tour. "There is a moment when it is dysfunctional not to look at the past," pronounces Bono in a DVD documentary titled From the Sky Down, the best supplement herein. Released two years before Zooropa, Achtung Baby served as both a monumental turnabout from The Joshua Tree in 1987 and revenge for the backlash accompanying that album's nominal rain barrel, Rattle and Hum. Berlin-birthed after the fall of the wall, Achtung Baby managed the impossible after The Joshua Tree with an equal amount of crucial hits: "One," "Mysterious Ways," "Even Better Than the Real Thing," etc. Yet where its precursor sequenced not a single nonessential track, Achtung Baby still drops off a cliff when it's not hitting – "So Cruel," "Tryin' To Throw Your Arms Around the World," "Ultra Violet (Light My Way)" – a fact reiterated on the B-sides/bonus tracks CD, which cobbles together the nadir of such compilations ("Oh Berlin") that made more modest repackagings of The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree essential. An alternate and/or nascent mix of Achtung Baby not only doesn't add to the dialog, it perhaps subtracts from it. That leaves two superfluous remix CDs and a pair of needless DVDs, one whose video remixes could have been appended to the doc and a Zoo TV concert in Sydney, which was new to DVD in 2006. Housed in a coffeetable book with aggrandizing essays (time for your autobiography, Brian Eno), Achtung Baby Super Deluxe Edition no doubt pales next to the $400 überdeluxe box set, which includes Bono's "The Fly" sunglasses.