Coldplay's Viva La Vida - Their most emotionally dynamic album (20080616)

From WikiColdplay

Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends

Are you sick of Coldplay yet?

I wouldn't be surprised.

We've been hit with such a marketing offensive for their fourth album, Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, you'd think the British rockers and their ever-shrinking label, Capitol/EMI, were trying to sell us a blockbuster movie - or a war.

Chris Martin and his bandmates are everywhere. The Hour. MySpace. MuchMusic. MTV. Rolling Stone. McDonald's Happy Meals. (Just kidding.)

You can stream their tunes online while listening to the frontman beat himself up in TV interviews. (Not kidding.)

"I was feeling bad because I'm sure there are some 16-year-olds or kids who say they like Coldplay and then took some abuse for it on the playground," Martin recently told The Hour's George Stroumboulopoulos.

"So I had a feeling about 18 months ago: I would really like to make them proud by trying to improve."

Did he succeed with Viva La Vida?

Let's just say if you're not tired of Coldplay now, you will be in a couple of months. Get ready for a flood of articles, blogs and TV specials heralding Coldplay as the saviours of rock 'n' roll, the touring act of the year, blah blah blah.

Hands down, Viva La Vida is their most ambitious, passionate, uplifting and emotionally and sonically dynamic album.

You can tell Martin, guitarist Jonny Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion desperately wanted to become better musicians - and not just rewrite their hits (Clocks, The Scientist).

But it's not quite as revolutionary as Coldplay or some critics would like you to believe.

True, the British musicians don't always rely on standard song structures or Martin's fragile falsetto, but they do take more than a few subtle cues from their counterparts.

Indeed, Coldplay's latest effort is nothing more than a cross between The Beatles, U2 and Radiohead. This is best encapsulated by 42, which starts off with a John Lennon-ish piano melody reminiscent of Imagine and a Bono-esque spiritual message, then segues into the unsettling, jittery guitar riffs of Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood.

Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love is propelled by an Adam Clayton-style bass and Martin's best impersonation of Bono - complete with lyrics about "soldiering on" - while Life in Technicolor burbles with eerie electronics, then clangs with a Middle Eastern vibe.

You can credit - or blame - U2 producer and ambient artist Brian Eno for Coldplay's latest rush of creativity. He wasn't a fan of the band and wasn't shy in telling Martin so.

"He goes, 'Your songs are too long. And you're too repetitive, and you use the same tricks too much, and big things aren't necessarily good things, and you use the same sounds too much, and your lyrics are not good enough.' He broke it down," the frontman told Rolling Stone.

Eno's fingerprints - or "sonic landscapes" - are all over Viva La Vida, which will likely win new fans or, at least, warm the hearts of a few music snobs who used to discount Coldplay.

His fluttery, ambient waves of electronica buoy Buckland's searing Edge-like guitars, Berryman's sensual bass lines or Martin's piano melodies, which often echo like amplified glockenspiels reverberating through a church, as on the title track.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=51622076-0dc8-4c93-960c-05f9a7038fc8