13 September 2005: Sound Advice Amphitheatre, West Palm Beach, FL, USA

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13 September 2005: West Palm Beach

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It took a sweetly sonic band like Coldplay to turn a normally goofy concert practice such as the bouncing of random beach balls through the audience into something truly "Aww"-worthy. But the British lads, led by the unfailingly polite Chris Martin, had won the Tuesday night crowd over long before huge yellow balloons, filled with confetti, floated like lovely aliens through the air during Yellow.

With piano-accented, easily singable songs; a fantastic video-inspired large screen behind the band; and the obvious goodwill of the crowd, Coldplay spread a musically lush mood over the crowd like so much sprinkled confetti.

In a musical world that celebrates edge and danger, Coldplay is like the cool geeky cousin of the really hot dangerous guy: Martin took time to ask those on the lawn at Sound Advice Amphitheatre whether they were all right, "because it's a long way back there," he said.

He also informed them that they weren't missing anything, "because we don't actually look that good." (Some ladies in the crowd, obviously taken with Martin's curly-cute locks and well-managed chin scruff, sounded like they disagreed.)

They took the stage, appropriately, to Square One, with Martin strumming ghostly against the large screen.

It was something of a wonder, that screen. At times, it showed twin Martins duplicated large above his head, as if he were singing to himself. The screen also depicted bursts of fireworks and smoke that complemented the band's flourishes nicely.

Coldplay has been accused of being a one-note pony, with all of its songs sounding basically the same. Although it's easy to hear the relationship between the backbeats of, say, Square One and Speed of Sound, and Yellow and The Scientist, they don't sound so similar or same-y played live, where it's easier to appreciate the band's musicality.

Band members aren't trying to play louder than the lyrics or seem like sexy-cool love gods. In fact, Martin jokingly said the numbers of bras thrown at them are frightening. And for a band as famous as Coldplay to have a lead singer who'd stop in the middle of a song and explain that he messed up, as he did during The Scientist, is pretty cool.

But that just makes them seem cooler, and, dare I say it, even sexy.

Source: palmbeachpost.com

Tuesday night's Coldplay concert at Sound Advice Amphitheatre was a coming-clean party of sorts for the band's singer, Chris Martin. Gone was the quieter, more reserved frontman who had led the British rock band through a masterfully somber set in Miami on a previous visit. In place of that figure, a sold-out crowd of 18,900 people got an openly talkative and charming bandleader with more confidence, physical presence and cheek -- the Chris Martin that one suspects was there all along, waiting for confirmation of his band's global stature before finally emerging.

The haunted, grainy voice that Martin trains on his band's atmospheric rock songs was unchanged on Tuesday. But with Coldplay rising up to become one of the biggest bands on the planet, a latter-day U2, the singer himself became an even larger figure in the live show, drawing all eyes and ears his way and clearly enjoying the attention.

Barely a minute into a piano ballad called The Scientist, Martin stopped suddenly and said, in so many words, he messed up. No kidding. A rapt audience listened to him explain that he lost the thread of the song while thinking about a doctor who, earlier on Tuesday, had given him his voice back. He had awakened Tuesday morning unable to talk or sing, and an unidentified local doctor who came to the amphitheater bearing various elixirs had fixed him up.

With that, he started The Scientist over and sang it with heart -- and without interruption -- until the song's swaying similarity to John Lennon's Imagine surfaced like an echo from another era of rock.

There was an element of the traveling medicine show to this performance, with Martin offering up a few elixirs of his own: song-shaped vials containing love, hope, empathy, kindness and other salves for the wounded soul. None of it was snake oil, really. The quartet played its grand, transcendent-feeling songs expertly enough. Bass player Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion anchored the mix with a dense, rolling undertone that kept airy songs such as Yellow, Politik and Speed of Sound in a clean orbit. Guitar player Jon Buckland added bright bell tones and single notes that floated star-like in an acoustical field designed to evoke the sensation of infinite space.

Songs including Clocks and Everything's Not Lost lived up to the perfectionism that went into their writing. And the band's visual palette of light sprays, strobes and galactic postcards lent a pleasant sense of flight to the music.

Sterling technique aside, it was clear that Martin wants the world singing along to his every note. He wants it badly. Now that Coldplay's third album has ratified and raised the band's popularity, he felt free on Tuesday to let some of that almost papal ambition show. He jokingly promised that someday Coldplay would be as slick as the Eagles -- they're pretty close, already, frankly. And the choice of comparisons is revealing. Coldplay also trotted out a cover of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, aligning itself with another legend.

Of course, overwhelming popularity and immortality are different states. Even at the Speed of Sound, we're a long way from knowing whether Coldplay belongs in the company of the greats that Martin is citing and appropriating.

Source: southflorida.com

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