Coldplay – ‘Viva La Vida’
Posted in Album Reviews on August 26, 2008
Rock Ballads hold a special place in my heart. The Rock Ballad, as I define it, is the ‘slow’ song – the one where the musician bares their soul for all to scrutinise. But what if your entire catalogue consisted entirely of ballads? Well for one thing, the quality would take a nose dive, the band would move past the moving and emotional category into the insipid and whiney side of things and you would probably get something roughly approximating Coldplay.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike Coldplay, however they’ve never really moved me. It’s probably something to do with Chris Martin’s vocal style. Sure he hits all the right notes with a clinical accuracy but I never get the feeling that he’s drawing from some deep hidden well of emotion.
Put bluntly I can’t tell whether he’s just been made a father or his mum’s been run over by a clown. There’s just no feeling in his voice. I’m positive one day I’ll turn on the news to find out that he was in fact an android and that the real Chris Martin is locked in a basement somewhere in the east end of London.
Yet despite my previous experience with the band I found myself enjoying Viva La Vida or Death and all his Friends. It’s like the rest of the band said, “That’s it. Screw Captain Cardboard and his bland vocal stylings,” and then proceeded to work around Chris Martin’s vocals – taking the emotional impact of the instrumentation up a notch rather than dropping it to his level – resulting in a paradoxical effort which can only be summarized as the first Coldplay album that people who don’t like Coldplay might actually like.
The most notable track on the album is of course the debut single Violet Hill a song which just makes you want to march and is the closest Coldplay has ever come to the word epic. Another track which springs to mind is the melancholic 42; a dynamic ditty that starts with a moody piano line and ascends into an evocative and jolly climax. I would also highly recommend the bluesy Yes – a jangly little number that features a fecking awesome violin line and is only spoiled later on by a foray into U2 style stadium rock bollocks.
Apparently the band had a sudden attack of stupidity halfway through the album and thought it was necessary to roll two songs into one track. They did it earlier in the album as well, with the song Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love but it seemed less obnoxious then because the songs were vaguely in the same stratosphere.
All in all however, Viva La Vida or Death and all his Friends is a daring and surprisingly experimental effort that presents a varied menagerie of songs that cover many moods and timbres. It will certainly please Coldplay fans, but more excitingly it may just win over some of those like myself who never really ‘got’ them before, or at least – as in my case, look at the English quartet in a slightly more kindly light.
7/10
By Lloyd Markham