Linear Winter is a bunch of poorly written pieces of music and lyrics poorly strung together. It sounds like a collection of lowlights from the NLOTH sessions, all of which coincidentally happened to be in the same key and tempo.
Brothers Winter is a palatable song. So yes, it's in a different stratosphere of quality from its predecessor.
Sorry El-Mel, I just don't agree with this at all. I don't see how you can say one is poorly written and the other isn't when it's essentially the same music and lyrics.
I prefer the Linear version because the atmosphere of it is so much warmer and more wide open, and it feels like Bono is giving his all to his vocal performance. It's passionate. The atmosphere of the Brothers version feels sterile and almost claustrophobic. The Winter version sounds and feels like it's being performed in a wide open space, while the Brothers version feels like it's being performed in small, confined space. That driving drumbeat that's behind everything on the Linear version is gone and Bono's vocals sound restrained, like he's holding back, in comparison to the Linear version where opposite is true, imo. The Brothers version features very sparse instrumentation, while the Linear version features the whole band creating the atmosphere, an atmosphere that is almost UF-like in nature.
Plus I prefer the naked 'oh oh oh' outro without the 'so glad you made it home' refrain on top of it, although in a vacuum I do like that line.
It just feels like they maybe intentionally made the song darker and more somber in tone in order to better match the tone of the film it was being used in.
Don't get me wrong, both versions have their merits, and it's not that I dislike the Brothers version, but I just prefer the Linear version(though there was a point when the Brothers version was newly released at which I preferred it, probably because it was new).
