Coldplay - "Lovers In Japan/Reign Of Love" (mp3)

When big populist bands decide to make their "difficult" record (and it's almost always a deliberate, calculated decision), it's usually a bad sign. Coldplay's pretty much always been a band whose self-image seemed a little out of step with reality, wanting to be artsy and credible and hugely popular, and only really achieving the latter. So they're prime candidates for one completely awful "difficult" album, especially when they went the obvious route of enlisting a producer whose hiring baldly telegraphed those intentions, Brian Eno.

But Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends (see? even the title is pretentious mumbo jumbo!) is actually pretty damn good despite all of this, with Eno's gorgeous production helping even their most potentially embarrassing multi-song suites go over well. Chris Martin doesn't sublimate his ear for big hooks, he just manages to writing them for songs with rambling chorus-less structures instead of ones that sound just like "Clocks" again. It's the kind of album that hangs together well even when not every song is a knockout, because it's ambitious without actually being very long (a combination that unfortunately is rarer and rarer in albums these days).

I've even come around to liking "Violet Hill," which I think I must've hated at first just because it's not the kind of song I want to hear from them as a big first single, but it's actually not bad. I don't think it was ever clear to me whether Chris Martin actually played the piano on Kanye's "Homecoming" or that was just a sample or something, but I never even thought it might be him until I heard how he plays on "Lovers In Japan." I love that the one aspect of U2 that they bite the most on this album is the piano sound from 80's songs like "New Year's Day." I'm still suspicious of anything that sounds like a bid for respect from a band as vapid as Coldplay, lest they actually get enough respect to really becoming the U2 of their generation for real. But for now, I'm OK with them getting a little more ambitious if it means getting something like Viva La Vida out of them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at 8:50 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.