COLDPLAY
X&Y
EMI
· Mark Hamilton and Jason Lewis go head to head on Coldplay’s third full-length.
Mark: My favourite thing about this album before having heard it was lead singer Chris Martin's proclamation that X&Y is a mixture of "oldplay meets boldplay." Best hype line ever.
Jason: Indeed, but you can believe the hype. The concept of oldplay is adhered to with the wistful vocals, repetitive lead guitar lines and mid-tempo, mid-song rock outs. The mixture comes when Martin and company make a modern-sounding album with ’80s synth tones and Adam Clayton bass lines.
Mark: I was pretty surprised at just how much of it sounded aged, and not necessarily in a good way. A few tracks are moldyplay. That, and this whole rhyme scheme we're riffing on, is about as deep as Martin's lyrics. Personally, I love it when he rhymes "wrong" with "song" and then realizes he doesn't know any other words that work and just goes back to "wrong" again (on "The Scientist" re-tread "What If").
Jason: I buy that. The title of the last album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, was cribbed from a rhyming dictionary called Rhyme Lines. Clearly Martin finds it handy if he needs to beef up his rhyme scheme.
Mark: Yet, despite how middling, familiar and obvious they are, I still dig Coldplay. The dudes want to play stadiums with big catchy songs that have instantly recognizable choruses and they do it quite well. Martin isn’t the most eloquent guy speaking about world economic problems, but at least he's using his forum to attempt something. And they don't often hide behind any cutting-edge pretence the way U2 has.
Jason: To be truthful, I almost never listen to the lyrics on a Coldplay album. I can sing along to a few older tracks, but with X&Y I hum the guitar lines. I can't name any other member of the band but a lot of the credit has to go to them. X&Y is really well built – there isn't much filler and even the songs that start out weak build into a guitar-wank extravaganza. Are they the next U2? Time will tell. Coldplay may have hit their stride earlier than U2, but that also means that they could burn out just as quickly.
Mark: And that brings us to one of my favourite things about Coldplay – Martin's continual proclamations that he fears that his band only has this many decent albums in them, that X&Y is the last record, that he's cool with living this rock-star life for awhile and then going off into the hills to raise children with Gwynnie (haha – Foldplay). Bono and friends should've gone away ages ago and imagine the legacy of the Rolling Stones if they had called it a day after eight years instead of stashing oxygen tanks behind the amps on their latest tours.
Yeah, X&Y is a supremely-crafted album – good to drive to, nice to listen to in the bath, pretty much challenge-free and catching. It's like an album of guilty pleasure hipster wedding songs ("Swallowed In The Sea"), and what's wrong with that? Who cares if they're Soldoutplay? Good for them.
3/5
MARK HAMILTON
4/5
JASON LEWIS
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