Coldplay stretches wings to new heights in latest CD (20080622)

From WikiColdplay

Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends

When Coldplay first hit the mainstream at the dawn of the century with their debut Parachutes, they were quickly tagged as a kinder, gentler and much more user-friendly Radiohead.

Three albums' worth of their patented very heavy soft rock and more than 30 million in sales later, the band has shaken the Radiohead-lite tag. With its latest album, Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, anyone still looking to make comparisons might latch on to U2's Unforgettable Fire, the album that turned four young, earnest Irish lads into global stars and expanded on their early sound.

For that 1984 album, U2 hired producer Brian Eno to help them open up and add new layers to their sound. Coldplay, whose members have expressed admiration of U2, brought in Eno (as well as Bjork/Arcade Fire/Joseph Arthur producer/engineer Markus Dravs and electronic artist Jon Hopkins) to much the same effect with Viva La Vida.

The album is light on singer Chris Martin's piano ballads and swoon-inducing treacle such as Fix You, and adds traces of music styles from the many places the globetrotting band and its activist singer have visited in the past few years.

The first sign that the album won't be your standard Coldplay arena/heavy/soft rock affair is the violent cover art, Liberty Leading the People (La Liberte guidant le peuple) by French painter Eugene Delacroix, with the title in big sloppy letters painted on top. The opening instrumental, Life In Technicolor, builds with synth loops and exotic instruments and steady Adam Clayton-like throbbing bass lines.

Other new musical flavors are found in the waltz-time groove of Cemeteries of London, which sounds like an alt-rock sea shanty, and Lovers in Japan features drummer William Champion doing his best Larry Mullen march-time beat and one of the few sweeping and climbing Martin melodies. The track's second half, an unbilled song called Reign of Love, is one of the few piano-driven ballads on the album.

Throughout the album, Martin shies away from his falsetto. Yes finds Martin in a bad way — God, only God knows I'm trying my best/But I'm so tired of this loneliness, he intones in his lower registers, giving his words a bit more resonance along with the help of a Middle Eastern string section. That song also features an unbilled tune, Chinese Sleep Chant, which dips back into U2 territory with guitarist Jonny Buckland, who has apparently discovered his distortion pedal, playing slashing chords and sliding single-note melodic lines that float above the beat a la the Edge.

Just as with U2 and Radiohead, Coldplay's music wasn't broken, and the fact that the already massive band decided to challenge itself and by extension its fans, rather than rest on its laurels or songwriting formula, is a credit to their creativity. Fans who are content with the band's singles might find the album less catchy than their previous work, but more serious fans will likely appreciate the sonic expansion.

Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends isn't quite the sharp stylistic left turn of Radiohead's Kid A or even U2's Achtung Baby, but for a band as polite, self-deprecating and obsequious as Martin and his cohorts, the album suggests that Coldplay has at least turned on its left-turn blinker, and hopefully future albums will take them and listeners to some new and interesting places.

http://www.ohio.com/entertainment/20637764.html