I apologize for jumping to conclusions, you just seem to hate everything post Pop so much I just found it odd that you would find Bomb better than.. well, pretty much anything.
Bomb has aged the worst for me personally. Its strange that for every new album that is released the one prior to it gets immediate backlash and the one prior to that seems to get some sort of nostalgic reprieve from it's previous criticism.
I wouldn't say I hate everything post Pop. I still think Elevation and Vertigo tours were very good (I thought 360 was a disaster, again for many reasons I've stated a couple of times here); live versions of ATYCLB songs were much better than on the record, and I like parts of Bomb and Horizon (but the "replayibility" aspect simply isn't there). And of course, the two songs from Million Dollar Hotel Soundtrack are excellent.
I'm actually more critical about Horizon after recently hearing it again after a long time, but I still think that as a whole it's better than the new one. When taking apart both albums, I will say I find the final three songs from the new one the best U2 has sounded in a long, long time. But it doesn't cover the "damage" of those first six songs, which is the nadir of their output for me.
So yeah, it's a bit more complex than being simply nostalgic.
It always amazes me how different people's perception of the same thing can be.
I find this reaction also interesting, since I always thought there is a general sense of The Bomb having more punch, with songs like Vertigo, Love and Peace and COBL, than ATYCLB, which is (production-wise) such a vapid, tedious effort. However, not to be misunderstood - don't necessarily mistake what I loosely call "energy" with quality.
