It's a solid read, except that the following is slightly wrong, in my view:
We already had a discussion on this topic, re: Edge's "acoustic" comment.
They'd already come up with a "new way of doing things", back around 1999.
The songs don't arrive out of small ideas that grow like in the 80's and 90's, they arrive out of ideas that already have a melody in place. In other words, the only way I can fathom a song like Pride or Ultraviolet (its unique guitar 'riff') coming together was purely by jam and that particular guitar figure naturally (magically?) arose out of it. Whereas so much of the stuff from the last 14 years seems like Edge is playing notes over pre-determined chords. So you end up, IMO, with a few autopilot songs like Walk On and Unknown Caller, or even Invisible. Where Edge is just plucking fairly standard root notes that anyone could have come up with. There's nothing unique about it.
To try to put a better example on it, think about the 'churning chime' songs. What happened to them? Think of the end of Zooropa, or the previously mentioned Pride and Ultraviolet or Streets or the crescendo of Bad any number of other songs. Unique chord patterns and cool sounds that almost had to come out of jams.
These days, it would be abandoned if Edge couldn't make sense out of the root chord. In the HTDAAB video that came in the deluxe album, Edge talked about Sometimes having an "illegal" note in it. Which is just another way of saying it had a variant in it (non-standard chord). And you can tell how he felt uncomfortable about it. They don't want to write "illegally" anymore. They want to write songs that can be sung around campfires with acoustic guitars.
So, no, they shouldn't figure out a "new way"' of doing things. They should go back to the way they were doing it that produced most of their magic.
That's how I see it.
