“42” and “Lovers in Japan” mirror each other beautifully in this respect, bring into focus Coldplay’s newfound knack for album flow. The following “Lovers in Japan” is similarly segmented as Coldplay continues to experiment with song structure, opening with a huge and uplifting anthem elevated by more soaring ambient guitar effects and closing with an intimate piano tune flavored by distant guitar strumming.
The track doesn’t linger in this space but rather transitions to a jam that breaks out further into an invigorating rock passage.
The first of “42’s” two parts is the closest we get to X&Y’s piano balladry, but a subtle use of strings and a persistently unsettled chord progression makes this far more interesting than anything on that record. The core of the track is a tight three minutes, notably improving on the overlong cuts throughout X&Y, and a somber piano outro provides a perfectly placed breath before the massive “Lost!” This much organ shouldn’t sound this good, but Brian Eno and Markus Dravs’ mixing of the song’s signature instrument with heavenly backing vocals and stadium-filling guitar somehow gives Martin the space to sing where lesser Bono impersonators would choose to belt their lyrics instead. Coldplay masterfully uses their guitars for ambience, doing right by dream pop inspiration Slowdive. “Cemeteries of London” is at once intense and ethereal, with its heart-racing three count and driving bassline underscoring an atmosphere of reverbed vocals and pulsating guitars.
#COLDPLAY ALBUM LA VIDA HOW TO#
On Viva La Vida, Coldplay finally learned how to get out of their own way, and the album’s soaring opener is one of the strongest examples of this lesson. “Life in Technicolor” breaks out into a cathartic guitar-driven instrumental anthem.
#COLDPLAY ALBUM LA VIDA FULL#
This is the first example of what has become one of the group’s greatest strengths, a humble instinct for calling on specially skilled collaborators to fill gaps in their own unremarkable technical abilities (see 2014’s Avicii feature “A Sky Full Of Stars”).
The motif would later be featured as a full-length track on Hopkins’ breakout album Insides, but here it’s an awakening, ushering us into a world immediately different from any previous Coldplay record. Martin and co.’s fourth album opens with an entrancing, shimmering ambient passage from producer and Brian Eno protégé Jon Hopkins. Viva deserves recognition, so let us embark on what would be career suicide for a Pitchfork writer: a rave Coldplay review. Coldplay has been so often criticized for not being Radiohead or U2 that their identity-defining masterpiece has been virtually left out of the discussion. It’s so rare for any artist to achieve their fullest potential in one project as efficiently as this, and yet the best-selling album of 2008 has flown under critical radar because of its popularity. At ten songs in 45 minutes, the album is the lightning-in-a-bottle strike of an ordinarily clumsy and inconsistent band suddenly hitting their stride. Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends succeeds in everything that it tries to do. Three years later, though, Chris Martin and his band released the perfect Coldplay album. Coldplay’s third album X&Y was bloated and repetitive, a lightweight U2 imitation that pushed only to fill the stadiums they had recently begun selling out. The debate over whether this makes Coldplay an essential pop group or an insufferably vapid snoozefest is one that will rage on until the band calls it quits, and in 2005, it looked like the latter would be the band’s legacy. All of their albums since their post-Brit pop soft rock debut Parachutes have come with their own global mega-hits, most of them emotional stadium anthems that don’t really say much of anything. Coldplay has always known how to appeal to the masses.