Livin' La Vida Loca

Viva La Vida
Coldplay
Capitol, 2008
3.5 stars

Like it or not, Coldplay are our generation's U2. Ever-reliable, in five years they gave us a masterful debut and expanded on it's sound with two excellent follow-ups. Now, three years on Viva La Vida takes the experimental tinge of X&Y and turns it up another notch - the simple piano-and-guitar songs that made Parachutes so good are still there, but they're buried under so much of Brian Eno's glossy, cinematic production that they're barely recognisable. Chris Martin has said that Sigur Ros are one of his favourite bands, and on a couple of the more atmospheric tracks on Viva La Vida, including opener Life in Technicolor, he gives a decent nod to their sound too. The organ-and-handclap-driven Lost! is a new sound all together for the band, but it works really well, as does Lovers in Japan with its brisk pace and reverb-soaked guitar. The album's title track even sees the band take a cocky step into the world of dance music - and, surprise surprise, it works too. In fact, the closest Coldplay come to sounding like the Coldplay of old is on the album's final track - but by then the mold is well and truly broken, a thousand kaleidascopic pieces on the recording studio floor. It's refreshing to see one of the biggest bands in the world taking a risk, but the odds were always going to be short - these guys are smart enough to know just how far they can push their sound without making it anything but easy to swallow. Still, it would be nice to see Martin spend more time with his hands on the keys of his piano, and less time waving them around in the air like some kind of stadium rock evangelist.

Artwork: B
It's a brave move, using an important piece of artwork as your cover image - though it kind of has to be an equally important album to pull it off. Past Coldplay albums have had a similar design, combining a striking image with a simple, elegant text layout, but Viva La Vida bucks that trend too. The inside pages of the booklet are a bit amateur, but apparently the band did them themselves, so we'll let it go. Overall, it's not a half bad effort.

Published in mX, Thursday June 19, 2008.