![]() ![]() There are songs here that only Eno could have produced. 2005 COLDPLAY ALBUM FREEThe hypnotized jam session was his idea, as was frequent instrument swapping, all to shake the band free of ingrained habits. (Given this third achievement, you could say that X&Y was an unintentional parody of an Eno album, place-holding until the real thing came along.) He likes to evict bands from their comfort zones. ![]() Timbaland once gushed that he’d love nothing more than to work with Coldplay, and this track helps us imagine what it might have sounded like if he had.īut who needs Timbaland when you can afford Brian Eno, another paradigm-flipping producer whose services are in far shorter supply these days? Eno is responsible for introducing David Bowie to noise, Talking Heads to polyrhythms, and U2 to cosmic sweep. There are Middle Eastern string breakdowns, Afropop guitar peals, a jaunty house-music pulse, and, on “Lost!,” a massive, rattling hip-hop beat that runs beneath a church organ. There’s a lively sense of disarray to the album, a splatter of different ideas and sounds that the band doesn’t try to tidy up. If X&Y was a big, shiny hot-air machine, you can all but hear Coldplay dismantling it on Viva La Vida. Martin’s lyrics are no better: The words sun, planet, and space appear repeatedly, cheap shortcuts to the infinite. Lousy with whooshing synths and crisscrossed with grand riffs that spiral nowhere, the album offers a lot of busy motion and little to focus on, much less curl up with. But X&Y, the sound of a young band overreaching for significance, is pretty overheated, too. Pareles’s designation was overheated-any reaction to Coldplay that’s more vitriolic than a groan or a cringe can’t help but seem unequal to the offense. Of course, it doesn’t always work, and on 2005’s X&Y, the album that prompted Jon Pareles to call Coldplay “the most insufferable band of the decade,” it hardly worked at all. He is a needy and insecure man-his songbook a catalog of apologies, questions, desperate promises, and prayers-and it is Coldplay’s considerable gift that it can make those qualities not only winning but galvanizing. ![]() This duality fit, because if Chris Martin is one part Bono, he’s three parts emo. ![]()
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