I have already wrote that no one is asking U2 to become or behave like Radiohead, that's not part of their ADN (even though they tried to in the mid-90's... Before Radiohead's "existence"). I don't want a "Pyramid Song", no one ever expects that.
No one wants a Kid A. No one wants a Zooropa or Passengers again.
What many diehards here pretend they don't understand about the "dissidents" is that the dissidents want U2 to be U2 without spending years emulating themselves. They've done it for 20 years in a row, but the locked that part of their genesis away and threw away the key.
You mentioned the Pitchfork attitude of ignoring the new song. I'm in Lisbon these days and BLITZ magazine is pretty much our Rolling Stone (Blitz was a weekly journal from the 1980's 'till 2006, but it became a monthly magazine and it is percepted many times a portuguese copy-paste of the american Rolling Stone now).
U2 is the artist that made more times the cover of BLITZ magazine. In its website, I remember that it was one of the artists that used to generate the biggest discussions and attracted lots of attention from the readers.
Today, Blitz published the article about "Invisible" and, guess what... The post of the article in their Facebook page, by the morning, had just a few "likes" and no comments about the song content.
In the website it only had 7 comments and all of them were negative. But negative in terms of "I just don't care anymore". It goes from "no, thank you" to a "thank God this is not the real first single of the upcoming album". There's another one - the worst - that (translating to english) says something like: "It's not bad because it's just another disappointment. It's funny to feel that this song could've easily been released 14 years ago in All That You Can.... That is, U2 have shown no evolution at all over the past 15 years, not even "a drop". Always the same formula that Coldplay have already proved they can now apply it much better now. I never thought I'd say something like this, but U2 became a second-rate Coldplay."
This is not the type of things I used to listen about U2... (what?) 10 years ago or so.
It might be a sign that adopting the strategy of being generic, self-emulating the eureka moments of the past, to keep on appealing the masses, it may not be working anymore, whether they take 1 or 5 year gaps between albums that always sound the same... Even to the casual listeners.
