I feel very much unable to weigh in on this album with anything approaching certainty, partly because I am currently quite busy and haven't yet had the time to hear it on a speaker (I think to get a good handle on a song you need to to test it in different environments), and because it is obviously too soon -- I have been wildly off base with my immediate reactions in the past.
Having said all of that, there are some things that stick out for me on SOE. The most immediate is that I feel like I am listening to a band that is quite different from the one I knew and that is mostly in terms of the accessibility of the melodies here. I think (may be wrong) SOE may be the record that starts a new U2. I think this is the point in their careers where they have married the 'very good' with 'great'.
The very good portion is that they are now genuinely good musicians capable of real variety, and you can hear that in the diverse styles of songs here. That it still sounds cohesive is a triumph of production and the fact that U2 are great in terms of their musical sensitivity. This is not to say that they did not have winning melodies in the past, but U2 struck me as a band that, through being greater than the sum of their parts, overcame their limitations and the results were pure magic.
The U2 I knew were, in my opinion, not guys who came up with accessible melodies as a matter of course and the post-2000s U2, till SOE, were a band that had to sweat blood bullets to bring out worthwhile music. All that seems to be left behind on this record.
I am not sure even I understand what I just said. This is an album to be grappled with.
Edit: oh, and another thing. The one thing that is certain is that they, Bono in particular, have gotten their emotional bearings back. Every song on this record takes you where the band wanted you to go, and those places are sometimes dark, at times moonlit, and at other times bathed in sunlight.
