I think we would all love to see Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois come back, to create that sonic space that tends to allow the breathing room for those classic U2 songs to emerge. There is another side to this, however. When U2 sets out to make a pop album (as obviously they have this time), they feel they have to be direct, concise, and in your face with bold and obvious colours, both lyrically and musically. Not even Lanois and Eno could curb them too much from this, as we saw on ATYCLB. This is also partly due to the studio technology that is now used. Never again will we here the organic production found on Zooropa and before. That said, I prefer the Eno/Lanois approach to pop songs (ATYCLB) to the Ryan Tedder approach, for example. At least they were able to give U2 far more cathartic results. Even the pop songs on ATYCLB carried a sort of catharcism with them. Songs such as 'Kite' and 'In a Little While' were wide open emotionally, despite their pop structures. Even songs like 'Elevation' had a sort of ecstaticness to them that can only be born out of the free spaces that Eno and Lanois seemed to create for the band. This seems to be the element missing now. But let's see.
