By Mark Brown, News Popular Music Critic

It's the same old story. A band gets big, it makes some great music. Then the band members get full of themselves and break up. They go off and make mediocre music, fall from grace and realize that being a great band wasn't so bad after all.
That's basically what U2 did, only without the breakup. While they never went away, they became unrecognizable for a while, caught up in the bloated, egotistical nonsense of the Popmart tour.

And even if last year's comeback album, All That You Can't Leave Behind, feels like paint-by-numbers U2, the band has worked hard to bring back its glory days.

It captured large pieces of that glory at the Pepsi Center on Wednesday night, its second sell-out of the year there.

It was a supercharged greatest-hits set, designed to forcefully remind fans just what they found compelling about the band in the first place. And while parts of the show were shaky -- the forced exuberance of Elevation and Beautiful Day -- -- overall it was a return to fine form.

Bono's voice hasn't lost anything over the years, and his sense of drama is still intact; during Sunday Bloody Sunday, he plucked a U.S. flag out of the crowd and hugged it tenderly before singing the lines "wipe your tears away."

At other times, the symbolism got a bit heavy-handed, with pop-up screens of Martin Luther King Jr. rising out of the stage during Pride (In the Name of Love).

Still, much of the show was vintage U2 -- committed, intense, emotional and rocking, propelled by The Edge's guitar.

Even the All That You Can't Leave Behind material came across better in concert than on disc, with Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of becoming a show highlight. The band also wisely retired some of its overworked material, like Mysterious Ways.

There were a few change-ups thrown in, including a fairly rare reading of All I Want Is You, the early single Out of Control and the always-welcome Until the End of the World.

It's still hard to convince yourself that we've got the U2 of old back, but if nothing else, the band has a strong foundation for the second half of its career. There could be a beautiful day out there after all.

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