Review: Viva La Vida by Coldplay

While I don’t usu­ally veer off from review­ing films or books, I fig­ured this new album would be worth my two pence since, after all, Coldplay makes some reli­ably cin­e­matic music.

I remem­ber 2000’s “Parachutes” album from the soon-to-be pop stars Coldplay. In one fell swoop those Brits invaded our shores and front­man Chris Martin stole many of our girl­friends with his ruggedi­zed nerdy white boy swag­ger. Damn them, I said as a high school sopho­more; they’re music is too girly. I’ll just sit over here and jam out to Lit or Blink 182 because I’m so cool. As quickly as the group became chic it became even more-so to hate on them.

But the truth is they’re amaz­ing, that album in par­tic­u­lar.

Back then, what they were doing with instru­men­ta­tion and beats wasn’t really seen in songs that tween­ers and up might gen­er­ally rock out to. If not orig­i­nal, it was cer­tainly fresh. And so they came kick­ing back with 2002’s pro­lific “A Rush of Blood to the Head”. They gave the world not only another take on that sound they teased us with on the pre­vi­ous album, they per­fected it into some­thing astound­ing. They set the bar extremely for what pop could become, and they have been con­sis­tently imi­tated ever since.

The lat­est imi­ta­tor of their best sounds: Coldplay.

“X&Y” really was a xerox of “A Rush…”, or maybe even a sequel. Granted, I have spent plenty of time rock­ing out to it over the years (by rock­ing out, of course I mean I pre­tend I’m hav­ing an indie-film real­iza­tion moment whilst ascend­ing the sub­way stair­well), but I don’t even think the boys can deny the sim­i­lar­i­ties, track for track, to their best album. Every band is allowed to do that after awhile: they can’t all be the Beatles, right? “Viva La Vida”, how­ever, gives us just more of the same again, which isn’t so bad because that same is pretty good.

Perhaps as a recog­ni­tion of the count­less media mak­ers who invoke their music when heavy-handedness is needed, the first track is titled “Life in Technicolor” and boy is it cli­mac­tic. It may be my favorite song on the disc, per­haps because Mr. Martin has stayed well enough away from driz­zling his vocals all over it. It’s full of peaks and val­leys that really gear you up for what could be a really expe­ri­en­tial album, but you are soon let down once track two kicks in. While “X&Y” had an obvi­ous struc­ture albeit culled from their usual bag of tricks, this mean­ders around songs thrown together.

Look, I could go down the list of which tracks sound like older songs and why, but screw that. Let me tell what I did like. Maybe it’s just my per­cus­sive blood talk­ing but my favorite track has to be “Lost!” which starts off in a fairly tribal man­ner, kinda Enya meets the organ from “Fix You”. I think hands down the most explo­rative aspect to this album is Will Champion’s drum work. It really is a wel­come change and this track really shows some new riffs on a rel­a­tively staid melody.

Again, “Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love” offers up some really cool beats, and over­all is prob­a­bly the most orig­i­nal track on the album. That loud piano bang­ing that once shook our bones out of the ordi­nary when they first started is back and every­one really steps up to make some­thing spe­cial hap­pen here. I promise it’ll be a fre­quent iPod selec­tion for me.

The title track again offers up some more inter­est­ing rhythms, but that’s about it. While I love the drums, it seems the rest of the band is stick­ing too closely to the per­cus­sion on their respec­tive instru­ments, mak­ing the song get quite bor­ing after about ten sec­onds. Don’t worry, folks, it won’t stop this song from mak­ing a big sum­mer splash. It’s easy to tap along to and mimic Mr. Martin’s croon­ing in the shower.

Do I hate this album? Nah. Do they need to rein­vent them­selves? Hell yes. Then again, we prob­a­bly wouldn’t buy their albums if they didn’t sound like Coldplay. With all the knock­offs avail­able to your ears, you still can’t beat the original.