Coldplay
“I don’t know why there is a Cantonese version of the song ‘YMCA.’ I know even less why there’s a music video with Skeletor in it. In other news, go listen to the new Coldplay album.” – Li
“Wait…they’re the band that did that song ‘Yellow?’ I HATE that song!” – Al
Albums reviewed:
Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends
Now, why the hell am I reviewing
Coldplay? Well, a few reasons. I wanted a third band page to put up when I
actually launched my site, they only made two albums (so not much to write),
plus my roommate loves them, and since he’s actually showing me how to do this
website stuff (I’m clueless), I figured “why not?” It’d also be nice to have a band I won’t
sound like an obsessive fan-boy about, to contrast with Nirvana or Radiohead. To tell you the truth, originally I was gonna
get all and hot and bothered and go “Coldplay are overrated! Down with Coldplay! Up with Radiohead!” but, for the purpose of
reviewing them, I went and listened to their two records a few more times and
found I really did like this band more than I thought. They’re a good band, not a GREAT band, but a
good band. I certainly like them more
than the other post-Radiohead Britpop/Britrock/whatever bands, like Travis, or,
um…Starsailor? They’re British,
right? Whatever. I don’t even know who any of these
post-Radiohead Britpop bands are. That’s
a side effect of not living in
Anyway, I
really do like this band. I also like to
(occasionally) rock out, but I’ll have to look for that somewhere else. If you looked up “tear-jerking balladry” in
the dictionary, you’d find these guys.
If you looked up “vomit-inducing crap loved in
Parachutes (2000)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Trouble”
Boy,
am I sure glad I don’t live in
Anyway,
it’s so painfully obvious how much this band is influenced by Radiohead it’s
not even funny. “Yellow” sounds like
something from The Bends, and a lot of the other material sounds like
the OK Computer Radiohead we see in, oh, I don’t know, “Lucky” or “Let
Down” or something. I’ve got no problem
with this, though. They picked a great
influence. The main thing that screams “OK
Computer!” to me is the little keyboard and synth touches all over this record
that you catch once you play it on headphones.
Very tasteful, very soft, and very unobtrusive. They’re actually much less obvious than those
used in OK Computer. They’re
really just background noise, but pretty neat background noise. The album opener “Don’t Panic” has some of
this going on. It’s also a great song,
to boot. It’s too short, though, only
two and a half minutes. It feels like
the band drew a blank during one of the verses so just decided to stop, cut if
off there, and go have a pint. Another
place they obviously couldn’t come up with enough for a song is the title
track, which is just 45 goddamn seconds long!
What the fuck? It’s just a
linking piece…but linking what? This
isn’t a concept album or anything, and it comes between two songs that are
about four minutes long each. Oh,
speaking of undeveloped material, “
There were a few hits on this thing, too. Maybe you’ve heard of them? “Yellow” and “Trouble” were both VERY deserving. “Yellow” is the only use of heavy Bends-style guitars on the album, and I’d wager the only time Coldplay will ever really use them at all. It’s so simple, but it’s also one of the best “sing-a-long” songs I’ve heard come out in a helluva long time. The other single, “Trouble,” is easily the best thing on here. It’s just so gorgeous. When the “And I…didn’t mean to cause you trouble” chorus comes in, I get the same chills that “Fake Plastic Trees” gives me. Those are damn good chills, my friend. The pianos are all over the place during the chorus, with those awesome slide-guitar notes coming in and out of both speakers. It almost creates a “wall of sound” effect, or it seems like it at least, since the rest of the song is so quiet. The closer “Everything’s Not Lost” is also a great song. It’s one of those songs that could ONLY be at the end of an album, like “Salt Of The Earth” from Beggars Banquet or some other stuff I can’t think of right now because I’m drunk.
I’m kidding, I’m not drunk right now, though I often am. It was one night a few days ago when I was VERY drunk I realized who the real star of this album is, and that would be the singer, Chris Martin. Even though he’s obviously just doing his best Thom Yorke impersonation here, I actually like his voice BETTER than Thom’s. He goes so HIGH, but in a good way, not an awful “I’m really a five year old girl” Geddy Lee way. I hate Geddy Lee. Anyway, he single-handedly makes some tracks memorable (like “Shiver” or “Spies”) that would otherwise just be mediocre. What a lost, lovelorn young lad! That’s what he sounds like, and that’s obviously EXACTLY the effect he was going for, too. Don’t you love it when that happens? When you try to make something happen, and then it turns out exactly that way? I bet Adam Sandler had that feeling when he watched the final cut of “Little Nicky.” Or not. In any case, unless you’re Al and you hate “Yellow,” I’d recommend this record to you. It’s better than Travis. That’s for sure.
A Rush Of Blood To The Head (2002)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “The Scientist”
Originally, I was gonna give this record a 7 (or maybe even a 6!) because it just didn’t grab me the way Parachutes did when I first listened to it. Then I remembered I HATED Kid A when I first heard it. I also thought Let It Bleed was just decent when I first heard it, and I was sure wrong about THAT! So I figured I should give this album more of a chance. Plus I was planning on reviewing it, so I was gonna listen to it anyway. What I can say now is that this is definitely an improvement from Parachutes. Not a huge one, but a step forward nonetheless. It took me a while to realize that because this is a much denser album than their debut. Not like “weird” dense, but it just has a fuller, much more detailed production that takes a little while to assimilate. There’s a lot more going on in the songs here. It seems like there’s a piano and/or string arrangements in every fucking thing, but that’s good! I like when there’s lots of stuff going on. It takes the boredom out of things. Maybe classes wouldn’t be so boring if there was other stuff going on in them, like backup dancers or possibly midget go-cart racing.
Now, besides being denser and fuller, this record is also more consistent than the debut. Parachutes was basically four really good songs and six “eh” ones, and was VERY dependent on Chris Martin hitting all those super-duper high notes to make it fun. Those four great songs WERE sequenced wonderfully, though. One at the beginning, two right in the middle, and one at the end. This is different from a band like, oh, say, U2, that sticks all the best songs together RIGHT AT THE START OF THE ALBUM, so by the time you hit track four or five or whatever you’ve got NOTHING to look forward too. Sequencing is important. This record is sequenced pretty well, too, though there’s no “Trouble” or “Yellow” that just grabs you and DOES NOT LET GO when you first hear it. One song comes pretty damn close, however, and that would be “The Scientist,” which has one of the best drum entrances I’ve heard in a while. You know why it’s so damn good? Because it’s SURPRISING. You don’t expect it. See, it starts out with just piano, then an acoustic guitar picks up after one verse, and you figure that’s all the instrumentation you’re gonna get, but THEN the drums kick in, and it absolutely rules. This is different from the new song “Electrical Storm” by umm…oh, U2! When I heard it for the first time, I could count “5…4…3…2…1…drum entrance” just like that. It was SO FUCKING PREDICTABLE. I HATE predictability. “The Scientist” kicks ass, though. Well, it doesn’t kick ass, since it’s a soft, swooning ballad, like almost everything Coldplay have ever done, but it’s really good.
Most of the other songs here are also good. Like I said, they’ve ditched the inconsistency of the last record for the most part. “Green Eye” isn’t very good, and “A Whisper” is forking AWFUL, but that’s about it. “In My Place” is great, and if you watch MTV2 (which we get here on non-cable Channel 24, huzzah!) regularly you’ve probably seen the video about 56,872 times. The opener “Politik” pretty much rules too. Those guitar chords are a great way to open up the album. I like “Daylight” a whooooole lot also. The chorus here has a Phil Spector-ish wall of sound thing going on, and I refuse to hedge that statement like I hedged a similar statement concerning “Trouble” in the previous review. It’s just another example of the bigger, fuller production all over this album, which I thoroughly, like, dig, dude. There’s just more to sink your teeth into in the songs. Like whereas Parachutes is a regular little hamburger or something, A Rush Of Blood To My Schlong is a WHOPPER.
There’s one
general complaint I have about the record, though, and that would be exactly
what made the debut kick ass, Chris Martin’s voice. Now, it’s still great, don’t get me wrong,
but he doesn’t utilize it as much here as he did on the last album. Part of that, I’m sure, is that he doesn’t
HAVE to, since there’s more going on in the production, and he knows it, but he
doesn’t nearly as often hit those “WHOA!” high notes like he did on Parachutes. He hits a few in that AWESOME chorus to
“Daylight.” He hits one in “A Whisper,”
too, but since that song sucks to holy hell, it doesn’t make much of a
difference. Ooooo, he hits a bunch in
“Warning Sign” too. I love that
song. He’s also crooning all over the
place in the closer “
I’m just kidding. I actually like U2 a lot. The Joshua Tree rules my ass. But they do sequence their records badly, and “Electrical Storm” sucks, something you’ll be able to confirm once you start hearing it ad nauseam everywhere pretty soon. The Joshua Tree is awesome, though. It’s better than either of Coldplay’s albums.
X&Y (2005)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Fix You”
Well, what do you know? We all (well, myself not included, but lots of people, in any case) wait months and months, hear Chris Martin go on and on about how this is the best Coldplay album yet and it couldn’t have turned out any better, how they’re really going in a new direction in the studio and trying all sorts of things to make their songs better and fuller and yadda yadda yadda…and guess what? The first single is a completely ridiculous, half-assed rewrite of “Clocks” (including the exact same piano line, just with a different (worse) keyboard tone) and the most apt description of the material found here as a whole is “oh, just more Coldplay music.” This aggravates me. With the incredible success of Rush of Blood, Coldplay had the potential to move up into that U2/Radiohead stratosphere of untouchably famous bands, bands of near-mythical status (with the process, ofcourse, being helped by Chris’ marrying Gwyneth “Not At All Hot” Paltrow and somehow convincing here to move to London, have a kid, name it after a fruit, and stop making movies altogether when she had been one of the biggest stars in the world up to that point…that is celebrity cache, my friends). However, the bastards played it safe. Since they play giant stadium shows now (the club I saw them in three years ago will never host a Coldplay show again) and it’s becoming increasingly clear that Chris Martin has an unhealthy obsession with Bono, they wrote BIG “stadium songs” with ambiguous, universalist lyrics that all sound disturbingly similar to their last record, as well as freakishly identical to one another, thus freeing up that “mega-uber famous band” slot for Green Day to slip into instead.
My personal feelings toward the music on this record are kind of conflicted. On the one hand, compared to their previous material, as I said before, it’s safe and lighter-ready and extremely disappointing coming from a band I definitely considered myself a fan of several years ago. On the other hand, though, it’s not like this is a Weezer situation where a band suddenly forgets how to write songs. Objectively, and without considering what had come before, this is actually a pretty good album, and not all that much weaker than their first two (just one rating point, in any case). It’s incredibly pretty, extremely melodic, and exceedingly pleasant on the ears, and Chris Martin’s voice is still in peak form. “Speed of Sound” is still terrible, ofcourse, but bar possibly “Twisted Logic” (simply annoying), there aren’t really any other songs here I’d skip, with the best, ofcourse, being the three that actually sound different from everything else. “The Hardest Part” is a lighthearted, near-bouncy piano pop number that reminds me, in tone, of the naive material on Parachutes, the time when Coldplay didn’t feel like they just had to be “the next U2.” The closer “Till Kingdom Come” is the only track that lays off the “detailed” (read: neutering) production of much of the remaining material here and contains a genuinely interesting chord sequence in there somewhere, and “Fix You,” their self-described attempt at an “epic” and a song I’m already hearing on the radio in a clear attempt to make people forget all about “Speed of Sound,” is probably the only tune here that can match up to the best Coldplay entries from the past. Great use of dynamics in this tune, from its quiet little intro to the loud drum entrance and everything in between. It’s the only “immediate standout” here, in any case.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna get a little more subjective again and start ripping Chris Martin, who is starting to get a little out of control. He wants to be Bono and he wants his band to be U2. That’s fine. Same with a lot of people. But do you really need a picture of Bono in the studio during the entire recording of your new album? And do you really need to adjust the mix so that all you can hear in nearly every song is the vocals and keyboard? The production here buries everything else! I can barely hear the guitar parts (ofcourse, they all sound like third-rate Edge ripoffs, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing). Take a wild guess who plays piano in this band, by the way (hint: it’s not Will Champion!). The guy has eight different colored wristbands on at all times, tattooed the symbol for fair trade on the outside of his hand, has taken visits to poor countries in Africa for photo ops with little malnourished black children…which is all well and good, ofcourse, but he’s acting so much like Bono by this point it’s becoming tiresome. All he needs now is some designer sunglasses, hairplugs, and a Jesus complex, and he’s all set to go.
Whatever. This is a nice album, and the reason I haven’t mentioned too many songs by name is that they all sound the same. They’re very pretty, melodic, and pleasant, albeit overproduced to the point where too many of the instruments (especially the near-absent electric guitar) become indistinct. They will never be anything more than that, but it’s not like Coldplay were going for anything more than “pleasant, and sounds good in Giants Stadium,” so, again, whatever. And the incredibly harsh critical reaction to this album shows just how vindictive and ridiculous critics can be, by the way. Back when they started out, Coldplay were the darlings of the British indie music press. These nice, humble guys playing pretty Britpop that sounded vaguely like early Radiohead, but more “friendly.” They were their band. Then they got huge. Chris Martin turned into a poor facsimile of Bono and married a movie star. Then, after they get huge, they play it too safe and make an album a little weaker than what came before, and boom! They pounce. Coldplay’s not their band anymore. They’re the band of the unkempt masses, and thus easy targets for ridicule. I say get a life.
Anyway, if you like Coldplay a lot, you’ll like this album. If you don’t like them, don’t bother, and if you’re lukewarm, don’t bother either. Just safer, neutered imitations of material gone before, but very nice to listen to regardless.
By the way, can you tell I wrote the first two reviews on this page nearly three years before this one?
Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends (2008)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Violet
Hill”
First of all, lest anyone be of
the opinion that I am somehow less than objective in my musical ratings (Hey,
Weezer fans!), I want to say that at this point I fucking hate Coldplay. I
know I defended them (sorta) in my X&Y
review because all the critics and such people had turned on them for going
“mainstream” and not being “their band” anymore, but back then I wasn’t fully
aware of the degree to which Chris Martin was completely fucking obsessed with
Bono, and remember that I despise
Bono (and yet I gave the last U2 album an 8!
So suck on that!). I personally
can’t believe it, but it’s taken only four albums for Chris Martin to turn into
a complete and utter self-parody. I saw
these guys play on the Daily Show (one of the few TV shows I still watch
regularly) a few weeks ago, and the man I saw fronting this formerly nice,
humble little Britpop band looked beyond ridiculous. He had a black blazer-type thing on, and
around his left arm were tied somewhere between seven and ten different colored
armbands, covering his entire arm,
from his wrist up to his shoulder.
Because I’m an asshole and I like to make assumptions, I’m gonna go
ahead and assume that each different color was meant to “raise” “awareness”
about some international issue or other.
I’m all for “raising” “awareness” and helping starving people in various
places, but come on…are you serious?
You’re covering your entire left
arm (i.e. the arm pointing toward the camera as he played “42”) with
different colored armbands? How much
“awareness” can you reasonably expect one man to “raise?” It just seemed like a bad joke to me, like a
mediocre movie with Owen Wilson or someone in it about an over-serious
Bono-esque pop singer who wears fifteen different wristbands and visits
starving children in
The proof that I am objective despite my unstinting hatred of Coldplay right now is that I still gave this fucking album a 6! A 6! To an utterly bland album nearly devoid of power, charisma, and truly memorable hooks! See, no matter what Coldplay say they’re doing about experimenting or expanding their boundaries, and no matter how many times they hire Brian Eno to turn their perfectly average songs into something slightly less average, Coldplay are a big, polished stadium band now. This album was #1 in like forty countries or something! This fucking album! Have you heard it? It’s not really bad or anything, but…really? You all want to buy something this bland? I suppose it’s nice to know that the U.S. isn’t alone in having crappy musical taste (and the sad thing is that, without even checking the Billboard Top 173 or whatever, I’m fairly certain that most of the records immediately following this on the current best sellers list are far worse), but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna let American record buyers off the hook. What, you liked the song in the iPod ad? Sure, there’s a decent string part in the verses there, but the damn thing’s not even catchy! And the chorus is such a huge letdown! A timpani roll and a few bells do not make a crushing climax if accompanied by such a half-assed melody and lyrics (“Roman cavalry choirs are singing?” The fuck?). The production on this song is very nice and pretty, but that’s all it is: production. It sounds nice (and, to be honest, really good coming out of a pair of good headphones), but there’s nothing actually there. There’s no heft, the melody is mediocre, the chorus doesn’t offer any interesting development from the verses…it’s just a nicely polished, pretty song with some mildly interesting string parts. It’s pleasant. It works nicely in an elevator, but not as a piece of rock music.
This whole album is like that (though, thankfully, a fair amount is better than “Viva la Vida,” if only due to its containing actual guitars). It’s produced (objectively) exquisitely. Everything is clear and full and crisp. It’s nicely layered, and all the instruments are very distinct. Definitely the best-produced record of Coldplay’s career, and for that I can probably thank Brian Eno. The problem is that Eno apparently didn’t push the band to do much of anything outside their comfort zone (or perhaps the band simply didn’t listen to him), so while the album sounds lovely, the slowly slipping songwriting of Chris Martin means that, to me, only one song on here is actually memorable enough to stick much after listening to it. “Violet Hill” (apparently the other single besides “Viva la Vida,” though it’s not like I would know that) is an admirable piece of work that actually shows traces of aggression (something I would never expect from this band) in the loud percussion parts and repeated buzzsaw guitar “DA- DA!! DA-DA!!” interruptions. On a melodic level, it’s not as good as anything from Coldplay’s first two albums, but at least it’s interesting and shows a side of the band I had no idea existed (even if the wimp-ass last thirty seconds go a long way toward undoing the good of the first three and a half minutes).
Elsewhere, this album is just, you know, “nice.” It sounds great (not the songs, remember, but the sounds), but a few listens show that the top-notch production job hides a lack of good melodies a bunch of annoyingly bland songs. The only “ethnic” thing I hear (because weren’t there supposed to be a bunch of “ethnic influences” on this record?) is the string parts in “Yes,” which probably don’t need to be there but at least make the song a bit more interesting than most of the rest of the album. This record is just more Coldplay Music, really, even if two or three of the songs are split up into two parts in an attempt to make their mildly nice stadium “rock” songs appear “artsy.” In terms of songs I like that I haven’t already mentioned, the quiet “Strawberry Swing” is pretty and unobtrusive and seemingly much less self-consciously “stadium”-sounding than the rest, and I kind of enjoy the opening instrumental “Life in Technicolor,” even though I’m probably not supposed to. “42” moves from an ultra-quiet piano part to a chunk with what Coldplay apparently think is a “powerful guitar riff” to a big chorus section pretty seamlessly, so points for that, I guess. The rest is thoroughly mediocre. I really don’t like “Lost!” at all, and the closer “Death and all His Friends” is just sloppy (inexcusable on a perfectly polished and spit-shined album like this one). Blah.
If I graded this album on how much I want to punch Chris Martin every time I see him, it’d probably get like a 3 or 4, but overall (and despite my criticisms) it’s perfectly OK, I suppose. It’s completely inoffensive, it sounds great (even if it isn’t), it’s got one genuinely good song and a bunch of other decent ones, and (despite its “big stadium” sound) I will admit it’s pretty tasteful. It’s not awful or pathetic or insipid in any way. It’s bland yet acceptable. It’s also gonna sell millions of copies and Chris Martin is now convinced he’s Bono. So, you know, that kinda sucks.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Don't really agree with you
on this one besides everything you said about Chris Martin being a
Bono-worshiping prick.
I actually don't find this album to be just "bland", I really think
there's some highs here, it's just that there's a healthy dose of tracks that
don't work too.
For example, I really like the title track here...sure the lyrics are
ridiculous, but at least the guy's not whining for once, and I don't see what's
wrong with the chorus; the "...but that was when I ruled the world"
line is a perfectly good final hook, and the whole thing has a real
organic-feeling epic sweep to it.
Actually, in contrast to what Herr Bono is so fond of doing, I think this album
is enormously back-loaded. The opening instrumental is okay (reminds me of a
more ambient, less guitar-driven version of
But man, if that seemed pretty damning, I like the rest of the album a lot.
"Lost" seems to me to be the most obviously arena-ready thing here,
but I like it (these guys do anthems pretty well, what can I say), and once
this thing hits the title-track it really cooks until the end. "Violet
Hill" and "Strawberry Swing" are both nice, humble, catchy
slices of Brit-Pop, and I absolutely love the closing "Death and All His
Friends/The Escapist", which for me stands up there with the best songs
these guys have ever done. I don't really get what's so "messy" about
it at all...the first part is just a gorgeous slow-building anthemic pop song,
and "The Escapist" coda works perfectly.
So I'd give this album a 7/10; the good stuff is pretty darn good (in my
opinion) and the duffer tracks are at least listenable and all.
One final comment: as much as Chris Martin disgusts me with his wannabe-Bono routine
(and honestly, what kind of asshole chooses Bono as his idol?), I'm still
pretty glad about the strong reviews this album is getting. I guess seeing the
complete screwjob that The Strokes have been given by critics makes me happy
for any band that avoids their fate (the whole "pre-mature massive hype
leading to critics being automatically disappointed by anything and everything
the band does" fate, that is).