GAAAAAAAAAARRRrRGHHHHHHHHHH

what makes people like that kind of music? it's not the misery, it's the blandness that offends me. if travis are the pot noodle of music, surely coldplay are like the babyfood applesauce of music.

Cabbage water is suitably bland, innit?

Wait! Bread and Gordon Lightfoot's stuff has 'lasted'? Even aged David Moore was unable to remember any Bread songs when I asked him last weekend.

That may be true but would you still like them if they didn't have nice tunes?

Gordon Lightfoot definitely has. Bread have a few songs that sound damn good. 'Baby I'm A Want You' is the one that springs to mind.

I mean I'm quite familiar with oldies and stuff but really, I have no idea what Bread and Gordon Lightfoot sound like. Maybe it's just me.

If "lasted" equals "makes me want to run out of the store screaming and shoplifting in protest," perhaps. In the event that the next hipster fad is 70s lite rock, I plan to seek refuge in classical music.

People. Let's not go there.

RJG are you around for a pint with Ally and I tonight or tomorrow or maybe BOTH?

Neither will I :)

I'd like to go to glasgow tomorrow evening.

when i want to wallow, i want serious wallow. i want joy division or scott walker or radiohead depths of wallow. i don't want "la la la, i'm kinda of ineffectual and bland and boring and depressed cause i'm so boring, la la la, so instead of actually writing anything of interest, i'll just wander around looking like a fish and whinging, la la la"

not to mention that that fucking video has made me UNABLE to take my jacket off while in a moving vehicle. i will sit and sweat uncontrollably in a leather jacket in a heated car and wait till we get to the services to change, rather than risk flying through the windscreen and making some crap boy walk around singing like a shellshocked fish.

coldplay doesn't annoy me anywhere near as much as some music does. if it's playing somewhere I don't think 'my God, if they'd turn this off just now then I would no longer feel sick like I do.' coldplay are nothing enough to be not awful.

del amitri used to send me into an nauseous fit. and then I heard a funny story about justin currie.

I don't hate Coldplay.

Merry Xmas to Scottish drinkers.

anyway, coldplay, wlel, whats wrong with ez-listening anyway? the cod-angst bit is a little silly i know, but i'm with david on the bread/lightfoot thing. i really dont think they're anything like as bad as everyone says. i wouldnt buy their stuff, but they are infinitely preferable to travis/oasis/radiohead surely?

jeff/tim buckley/some crap.

As for screamadelica, despite Bobby G being the prototype DDB, it remains the album that even Andy Wetherall couldn't save. It is another example of pure banality.

I'm far too drunk to construct a decent argument but given a chance to comit bloody murder on Coldplay or Travis I'd break the rules and kill both even if it meant hari-kiri.

what is it, osbourne night or summit?

(suzy and ian please stop contaminating our beautiful pure thoughforms wiht your evil cheeba smoking second hand smokeways...)

my ego is WAY bigger than his ass.

(we are the saddest people in the world, official, cause no one is even witnessing this drunken degradation of self...)

suzy is putting on more saki for us all, yaaaayyyy!!! gilbert and sullivan all round!

can i get this in quickly before nick posts his opus...

The ass looked at the angel... (pictured, left).

and i still hve my hate, so i am queen of the world, and you re not. so there.

assbandolier.

i am the very model of a modern assbandolier, i've information mathematical, mac and sounddustilier...

you changed the colour balance to make your chin look smaller and MY NOSE LOOK FUCKING HUGE... i actually wish my nose were that big. seriously. sigh. but please make my mouth smaller.

As for coldplay it makes me weep for the state of humanity. If they are so popular what hope have we left. They are some kind of wierd cultural vampires; no souls sucking the life from a generation. I know not everyone will listen to Ornette coleman but the cheeky girls have more integrity than coldplay. (I choose not to justify that statement yet)

integrity???????

thats just marketing man!

Also: for all of the (numerous) Coldplay hate threads we've endured, no one has yet to get underneath *why* they're so apparently so detestable. I mean, clearly they've got their finger on some collective nerve, but the best anyone seems to be able to do is prattle on about how "whiny" or "bland" they are, which really isn't all that engaging.

That said, I'm not even sure why I'm asking. I'm not certain that there's many critical levels I can defend them on, and yet I listened to that album more than any other this year...

It works both ways cos all I ever hear is "life affirming" or "cherubic" or "glorious" and it makes me want to stick my fingers in the back of my throat although I've just been quite sick a few minutes ago and I don't think I want that disgusting Domino's Pizza taste to come back. But I mean Coldplay seem so anti-fun to me, their music has this inbuilt superiority complex that because it's whining and moany it somehow means more, and I detect this throughout the reviews and also throughout the shit magazines I hate. Miserable does not equal profound.

Of course there's no way I can prove them to be shit, but those are my reasons for hating them. As for direct commentary on the music, I don't really find it greatly different from any other ballads which don't work (like Westlife or the Calling or something) it just comes across as wet except Coldplay trump most other acts I can think of for self importance.

This is a question I've been trying for work out for MONTHS now, especially in anticipation (and sorta-horror) of/at the album's placement near the top of my best of list for the year. So maybe my question above is more self-serving than anything.

To be honest, I've been having just as much difficulty getting a bearing on why I have nothing *but* warmth for this album. I said above that I can't really defend it on any critical terms - the lyrics are mostly atrocious, the arrangements suitably bland, the singing a little overwrought and self-important. Agreed.

The best I can offer is that these songs struck me at a time when I was particularly vulnerable to the familiarity of certain phrases, tempos, sounds, chord structures. After all, when you're going through a breakup, you don't always gravitate to the cleverest record on your wall - everything becomes more visceral, with your music spliced into basic food groups ("up", "down", "right" and "wrong") instead of "free jazz" or "new york hip-hop" or "instrumental persian traditional" or whatever.

Maybe it's the Moulin Rouge Argument redux. I'm not afraid to say I spent a few weeks completely numb with sadness, dumbfounded, unable to find recognition or solace in anything but the simplest phrases, the ones I'd spent a lifetime rolling my eyes at. Coldplay are dumbstruck and hamfisted and melodramatic, sure, but so was I and anyway nothing else seemed to fit.

Now, mostly removed, I find it impossible to listen to that album without recalling that old wistfulness, finally and happily transformed to affinity, carried over by inference.

Did I slum? Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that I could never, ever, ever write a song with a chorus that went "but the truth is, I miss you!" and yet somehow I spent an entire summer *listening* to one. And, well, public shamings be damned, maybe that's why.

With that new single, though, I can see where the hatred might come from. It's a bit of the same problem I have with U2, where four guys are playing sort of pointless wallpaper guitar plods and yet there's this general vibe, both visual and auditory, of their spreading their arms back as if they're standing dramatically on cliffsides and the wind of change is sweeping sublimely over them, tossing back their sensitive golden locks. You can really hear it in there, and it's very, very irritating. And the chiming riff from that single ("In my Place?") is deeply wrong. I let lines repeat over 16, 20 bars in my own songs, and I still get annoyed by that riff: that riff is like being stuck in a car with a full bladder while the 90 year old driver tries to parallel park just so.

The difference with 70s soft-rock was that it had a craftsmanlike air I can appreciate: there was this sense of musicians as technicians crafting ideally interesting pop products for you, which -- pre-punk -- wasn't perceived as incompatible with genuine deep emotion. (In fact I get the sense that through the mid-70s slaving away over pop-music-as-craft was actively linked with genuine deep feeling for music as an art form!)

Whereas bands like Coldplay, in our post-punk era, seem to stress the current emotion-releasing model, which is not craftsmanlike (even though they're craftsmanlike, too). (?) One winds up with the advantages of neither approach, really.

Nitsuh can you expand more on this please?

As for that second thing I think I mean that it's no longer expected for popular rock bands to be "technicians" or "composers" in the mid-70s sense: the public face of Coldplay seems to be more as a rock band grounded in some kind of rock tradition of emotionalism, not studiousness (which now falls to, umm, Radiohead and such). Soundwise and persona-wise, they're meant to sound honest, not overly crafted; on some level they actually need to play songs that have a certain level of structural accessibility to the lone teenager with his acoustic guitar. So unlike the actually quite elaborate productions of the mid-70s they push a much more minimized simplistic four-guy vision of what it means to make music "honestly," and I think the problem with a lot of bands like this is that they get stuck between that "rock" model and the more craftsmanlike model we say in the 70s. (Ultimate craftsmen = Carpenters, Abba, etc.)

I think that this is what I find distasteful about them - this 'worthiness' seems to have given them a certain cachet. They seem to have been accepted into rock's canon through this perceived depth.

I'm not suggesting that it's necessary to be worthy to be great, but it seeing as we frown upon manufactured bands, it's seems strange that Coldplay aren't picked up for manufacturing a sound. I think they've got some reasonable tunes but I can't escape the feeling that I'm listening to dolour-by-numbers.

I think it should have been 'It was all... vanilla'.

Did Ronan say this?!?

Anyway I'll leave this thread to be about the issue at hand and nothing else, where I'm pretty confident plenty of other people agree.

Of course, it's quite possible that she posted the above message by finding each word in someone else's post, and copying and pasting it into the right position in her own.

(Kate will also be surprised to see me posting. Yup, my girlfriend has yet to murder me.)

-- kate"

That is the BEST quote ever. So very true.