Winter fucking sucks. It's like Coldplay meets City Of Blinding Lights meets a boring Bruce Springsteen song. Why would you need this song? You've already heard two of them! You get Viva la Vida in the intro, and the guitar melody from COBL in Bono's singing on the verses.
Another thought: i hate these flimsy lefty protest songs about war being bad. Yea, no shit. People dying sucks obviously.
The topic of war is so much more powerful when done in a subtler fashion, as in WAS and COL, where Bono goes into the mind of a character, gives a small, isolated, matter of fact account of what's happening, rather than these big ass gestures that you hear in Winter, with all that anthemic music, like i'm suppposed to dance and pump my fist and start screaming out "butter on toast." I think WAS is the perfect rebuttal to Winter. It's quiet, it's a little eerie, it's got music that perfectly suits the lyrics. It only opens up once, climaxes during the middle 8, when the character reflects on his past, and it's emotional, and it lifts you above the horrors of war for a brief moment, but then WHOOSH, the dream has passed, grim reality sets in, the music is soft and eerie , the soldier is alone, lost and afraid. That is powerful. Winter is a fucking joke compared to this song.
