OFF THE RECORD: Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends

(Courtesy of Capitol Records.)

Excellent. Coldplay have decided to care about their music again.

You see, last time around, the band knew they were expected to come through with a massive commercial breakthrough. Hell, EMI’s market share fell sharply after it was announced that Coldplay had postponed the release of X&Y. And while they did sell ten million albums or so, by issuing an album that was heavy on radio-friendly anthems and light on any meaningful music or lyrics, Coldplay ran the risk of being written off artistically for the rest of their career.

So in comes Brian Eno, the famed producer behind critically feted albums like Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and U2’s Achtung Baby, and with him, vague rip-offs of celebrated bands like Radiohead (“42” sounds like each member of Coldplay took his favourite bit from In Rainbows and stuffed it into one multi-sectioned song), Arcade Fire (check the woah-oh-oh-oh-ohs at the end of “Viva la Vida”), and My Bloody Valentine (the guitars on “Chinese Sleep Chant” practically scream shoegaze). Then, in come a ridiculously unwieldy album title and revolutionary album cover. If you need further evidence that Coldplay are begging for you to take them seriously again, you can probably Google up a recent press interview where they explain their decision to cut the vocals from the album’s opening track “Life in Technicolor”, because the record company said it was the obvious first single.

Still, I have to give credit where credit is due. It’s a ballsy move in this day of diminishing attention spans to not only start your album with an instrumental, but to place all your best songs at the end. Sonically too, this album takes risks, taking on strange Latin rhythms (“Cemeteries of London”) and even jazzy guitar textures (“Strawberry Swing”). But there are only so many tricks you can teach an old dog and when it comes to lyrics, it’s unfortunate to see Chris Martin still living in a world where soldiers “have got to soldier on” and “sometimes even right is wrong”. And as much as they’ve tried to shake things up here, Coldplay still find it hard to resist going for the stadium-sized choruses (“Violet Hill”, “Lost!”). But being a stadium rock band, at least they know their place in the world.

That said, on “Viva la Vida” (the song, not the album), everything falls into place. A wave of strings is married perfectly to the vocal melody, and the lyrics, for once, are about something specific. By writing from the point of view of a deposed king, Martin is able to piece together an assortment of evocative images (Jerusalem bells, Roman cavalry choirs, missionaries in foreign fields) and imbue them with the essence of a dying era. Of course, parallels can be drawn between the protagonist of “Viva la Vida” and Bush or Blair as each finish their political runs, but the lyrics can stand outside of politics or history and still feel poignant and relevant.

And in the end, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends is still going to be an album that will sell about ten million copies, which probably means that it’s going to be the must-own CD of 2008 to all those strange buggers who only seem to buy one album per year. Luckily, unlike X&Y, it won’t be a stadium-sized disappointment.