Coldplay's La Vida: Worth its place on charts (20080617)

From WikiColdplay

Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends

(3 out of 4)

An old roommate and I had a bonding moment several years ago when he came home early one evening to find me rather contentedly sprawled in front of the video to Coldplay's "Trouble" with the volume on bust.

The song had been an object of savage mockery around our place. I was thus slightly ashamed to be caught enjoying it in private, until Jon confessed that he often did the same.

That's the thing about Coldplay. The boys take their knocks, but they're not that bad. And although his words rarely attain the level of profundity he's shooting for, Chris Martin knows his way around a universal melody. So Coldplay remains a likeable enough fixture on the pop charts, not least because it seems almost pathologically aware of those faults and earnestly intent on correcting them.

The cumbersomely titled Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends marks the Oxford quartet's most public effort yet at contributing some Serious Art to the rock canon, enlisting a trio of producers – most notably, U2 muse Brian Eno – to put an unconventional spin on Martin's stadium-filling ruminations on love, mortality and religion.

It's not the total sonic overhaul fans have either feared or breathlessly awaited throughout the media tizzy leading up to the album's release today, but it does take a few endearing risks with the Coldplay template and proves the band does have some interesting, if not remarkable, ideas up its collective sleeve.

"Cemeteries of London" lends an undercurrent of undulating moodiness reminiscent of U2 circa the Eno-helmed Unforgettable Fire. "Lost!" employs pipe organ and rattling, polyrhythmic percussion to intriguing effect. "Strawberry Swing" introduces itself with Afrobeat guitars. There's even a "hidden" track mid-album where Coldplay guns for some swirling, shoegazer vagueness in the vein of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless.

None of this should alarm admirers of "Trouble" or "Yellow" or the like, however, because, cosmetics aside, the songs all bear the unmistakable and generally inviting stamp of Coldplay's signature, swooning tunefulness. If one can overlook the thudding anti-intellectualism of Martin couplets like "Those who are dead are not dead / They're just living in my head," it's actually pretty pleasant listening from top to bottom, and the whole affair builds nicely from a dainty piano intro to some open-armed soccer-pitch anthemics on "Death and All His Friends" at the close.

Life-changing? No. Important? Not really. But it'll do.

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/444385