Jon Pareles on Coldplay

Could probably find it by searching for the article title in Google News - no sucky registration required! If I could be arsed. Sorry.

But put them all together and they add up to Coldplay, the most insufferable band of the decade.

This week Coldplay releases its painstakingly recorded third album, "X&Y" (Capitol), a virtually surefire blockbuster that has corporate fortunes riding on it. (The stock price plunged for EMI Group, Capitol's parent company, when Coldplay announced that the album's release date would be moved from February to June, as it continued to rework the songs.)

"X&Y" is the work of a band that's acutely conscious of the worldwide popularity it cemented with its 2002 album, "A Rush of Blood to the Head," which has sold three million copies in the United States alone. Along with its 2000 debut album, "Parachutes," Coldplay claims sales of 20 million albums worldwide. "X&Y" makes no secret of grand ambition.

Clearly, Coldplay is beloved: by moony high school girls and their solace-seeking parents, by hip-hop producers who sample its rich instrumental sounds and by emo rockers who admire Chris Martin's heart-on-sleeve lyrics. The band emanates good intentions, from Mr. Martin's political statements to lyrics insisting on its own benevolence. Coldplay is admired by everyone - everyone except me.

It's not for lack of skill. The band proffers melodies as imposing as Romanesque architecture, solid and symmetrical. Mr. Martin on keyboards, Jonny Buckland on guitar, Guy Berryman on bass and Will Champion on drums have mastered all the mechanics of pop songwriting, from the instrumental hook that announces nearly every song they've recorded to the reassurance of a chorus to the revitalizing contrast of a bridge. Their arrangements ascend and surge, measuring out the song's yearning and tension, cresting and easing back and then moving toward a chiming resolution. Coldplay is meticulously unified, and its songs have been rigorously cleared of anything that distracts from the musical drama.

Unfortunately, all that sonic splendor orchestrates Mr. Martin's voice and lyrics. He places his melodies near the top of his range to sound more fragile, so the tunes straddle the break between his radiant tenor voice and his falsetto. As he hops between them - in what may be Coldplay's most annoying tic - he makes a sound somewhere between a yodel and a hiccup. And the lyrics can make me wish I didn't understand English. Coldplay's countless fans seem to take comfort when Mr. Martin sings lines like, "Is there anybody out there who / Is lost and hurt and lonely too," while a strummed acoustic guitar telegraphs his aching sincerity. Me, I hear a passive-aggressive blowhard, immoderately proud as he flaunts humility. "I feel low," he announces in the chorus of "Low," belied by the peak of a crescendo that couldn't be more triumphant about it.

In its early days, Coldplay could easily be summed up as Radiohead minus Radiohead's beat, dissonance or arty subterfuge. Both bands looked to the overarching melodies of 1970's British rock and to the guitar dynamics of U2, and Mr. Martin had clearly heard both Bono's delivery and the way Radiohead's Thom Yorke stretched his voice to the creaking point.

Unlike Radiohead, though, Coldplay had no interest in being oblique or barbed. From the beginning, Coldplay's songs topped majesty with moping: "We're sinking like stones," Mr. Martin proclaimed. Hardly alone among British rock bands as the 1990's ended, Coldplay could have been singing not only about private sorrows but also about the final sunset on the British empire: the old opulence meeting newly shrunken horizons. Coldplay's songs wallowed happily in their unhappiness.

"Am I a part of the cure / Or am I part of the disease," Mr. Martin pondered in "Clocks" on "A Rush of Blood to the Head." Actually, he's contagious. Particularly in its native England, Coldplay has spawned a generation of one-word bands - Athlete, Embrace, Keane, Starsailor, Travis and Aqualung among them - that are more than eager to follow through on Coldplay's tremulous, ringing anthems of insecurity. The emulation is spreading overseas to bands like the Perishers from Sweden and the American band Blue Merle, which tries to be Coldplay unplugged.

A band shouldn't necessarily be blamed for its imitators - ask the Cure or the Grateful Dead. But Coldplay follow-throughs are redundant; from the beginning, Coldplay has verged on self-parody. When he moans his verses, Mr. Martin can sound so sorry for himself that there's hardly room to sympathize for him, and when he's not mixing metaphors, he fearlessly slings clichés. "Are you lost or incomplete," Mr. Martin sings in "Talk," which won't be cited in any rhyming dictionaries. "Do you feel like a puzzle / you can't find your missing piece."

Coldplay reached its musical zenith with the widely sampled piano arpeggios that open "Clocks": a passage that rings gladly and, as it descends the scale and switches from major to minor chords, turns incipiently mournful. Of course, it's followed by plaints: "Tides that I tried to swim against / Brought me down upon my knees."

On "X&Y," Coldplay strives to carry the beauty of "Clocks" across an entire album - not least in its first single, "Speed of Sound," which isn't the only song on the album to borrow the "Clocks" drumbeat. The album is faultless to a fault, with instrumental tracks purged of any glimmer of human frailty. There is not an unconsidered or misplaced note on "X&Y," and every song (except the obligatory acoustic "hidden track" at the end, which is still by no means casual) takes place on a monumental soundstage.

As Coldplay's recording budgets have grown, so have its reverberation times. On "X&Y," it plays as if it can already hear the songs echoing across the world. "Square One," which opens the album, actually begins with guitar notes hinting at the cosmic fanfare of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (and "2001: A Space Odyssey"). Then Mr. Martin, never someone to evade the obvious, sings about "the space in which we're traveling."

As a blockbuster band, Coldplay is now looking over its shoulder at titanic predecessors like U2, Pink Floyd and the Beatles, pilfering freely from all of them. It also looks to an older legacy; in many songs, organ chords resonate in the spaces around Mr. Martin's voice, insisting on churchly reverence.

As Coldplay's music has grown more colossal, its lyrics have quietly made a shift on "X&Y." On previous albums, Mr. Martin sang mostly in the first person, confessing to private vulnerabilities. This time, he sings a lot about "you": a lover, a brother, a random acquaintance. He has a lot of pronouncements and advice for all of them: "You just want somebody listening to what you say," and "Every step that you take could be your biggest mistake," and "Maybe you'll get what you wanted, maybe you'll stumble upon it" and "You don't have to be alone." It's supposed to be compassionate, empathetic, magnanimous, inspirational. But when the music swells up once more with tremolo guitars and chiming keyboards, and Mr. Martin's voice breaks for the umpteenth time, it sounds like hokum to me.

I see the same fact checker Kelefah used was hard at work here.

if THIS is what mr. pareles holds against chris martin, i wonder what he thinks of morrissey!

Yeah, that sentence stuck out the most for me as well.

As Coldplay's recording budgets have grown, so have its reverberation times. On "X&Y," it plays as if it can already hear the songs echoing across the world.

This effectively sums up the album and is all that anybody (fan or not) needs to know.

arg.....ringtones.

Dame un poquito mas lo que tu tienes por ahi
porque contigo yo quiero bailar ...

Not to mention the fact that Embrace's latest album is better than X&Y. Oh, and "The Good Will Out" (1998) was better than "Parachutes" (2000.)

That lame sentence is about as novel as the first butthole who claimed there was an abundance of "the" bands circa 2001.

A rock rarity

Coldplay boasts a most unusual creature: A front man lacking a super-sized ego. Ahead of the band's new CD, Chris Martin ponders what fame - and Gwyneth Paltrow - hath wrought.

By Dan DeLuca

Inquirer Music Critic

Chris Martin is sitting with his mates at the Brooklyn Academy of Music during a taping of VH1's Storytellers heralding his band's expected-to-be-huge third album, X&Y, which arrives Tuesday.

He ponders a fan's question: "What do you guys feel each member contributes to make Coldplay great?"

It has to do with "a chemistry we can't understand," says the gap-toothed, blue-eyed singer, pianist and husband of Gwyneth Paltrow. He looks over at guitarist Jonny Buckland, bass player Guy Berryman, and drummer Will Champion.

"Some of us are more outgoing, some of us are more reserved, some of us more technologically capable," the 28-year-old Englishman says. "Some of us can do a back flip. And all of these things combine to make us the 78th-best band ever."

That's a typically disarming display from the leader of the most modest, unassuming contenders for the title of biggest rock band in the world.

Every now and then, Martin - the son of an accountant father and music-therapist mother whose band's first two albums, Parachutes and A Rush of Blood to the Head, sold a combined 6.1 million copies in the United States - can rev himself up for a grandiose, rock-star-style statement. Such as: "We're aiming for U2."

And on X&Y, you can hear the stadium-size ambition. There's the grand sweep of the album opener, "Square One," and the way Buckland's Edge-like staccato guitar attack takes the fragile ballad "Fix You" to the 700 level, juicing up the piano-powered, soft-rock sound Coldplay trademarked with hits such as "Yellow" and "Clocks."

But when Martin sits for an interview a week after the VH1 taping in a Manhattan hotel room - Paltrow and Apple, the couple's 1-year-old daughter, are perhaps home at their Greenwich Village apartment - he scurries to explain himself.

"That was meant to be very complimentary," he says. "U2 is the highest point to aim for. They're on my list of my six favorite bands, or people." The others? "Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. Kraftwerk" - whose "Computer Love" is subtly sampled on "Talk," one of X&Y's most compelling tracks - "Brian Eno, U2, Radiohead. And [atmospheric Icelandic quartet] Sigur Rós - that's seven!"

The man can count.

But Martin wouldn't presume to say that Coldplay - who are among the headliners at Live 8 in London on July 2 and play the Tweeter Center in Camden on Aug. 7 - are as good as U2. Just as he disputes the assertion by the music magazine Blender that he's "the nicest guy in rock."

"That's probably Dave Grohl, or Wayne Coyne [of the Flaming Lips]. Or Bono or the Edge. They're all nicer than me, I'm sure," he says.

And while saying that his niceness is overrated, Martin - who rarely drinks, doesn't do drugs, and is a yoga devotee who surfs whenever he can - also contends that he's not even the coolest member of his own family: "My younger brother is much cooler than me. When he comes on tour with us, he's called the Anti-Chris. He's exciting, and I'm boring."

Tell that to the starry-eyed females assembled at the VH1 taping. They're playing air-piano, thought balloons above their heads reading, "Die, Gwyneth, die!" as Martin's supple tenor elevates skyward on the band's understated current single "Speed of Sound."

Martin's self-deprecation isn't entirely misplaced. The band's songs, which are credited to all four members, deliver big, swaying choruses, but there's nothing extreme or outrageous about Coldplay. Martin is prone to go on about his favorite political topic of fair trade - he draws an equal sign on his left hand every morning to remind himself of the issue - but he displays not a smidgen of Bono's narcissistic pomposity.

Coldplay is like U2 without the hubris, Radiohead freed from paranoia. X&Y is sure to extend the band's reach, but it essentially delivers what you expect: a pretty, comforting set of earnest songs about, in Martin's words, "existence and girls."

If X&Y doesn't sound the least bit tortured, it was nonetheless torturous to make, Martin says. It was begun early last year, and worked on obsessively in Chicago, New York, Liverpool and London. It was scheduled to come out in March but the band hadn't finished, which led to reports that the share price of EMI, their beleaguered record company, was suffering. "Codswaddle," says Martin: "I don't see how one band can bankrupt a record company, especially if they're on the same label as the Beatles."

Partly personal

Part of the reason for the long incubatory period for X&Y had to do with Martin's personal life.

"I married somebody really famous," says Martin, sporting five-day stubble and sipping mineral water. "And that affected my work in the sense of making me want to shut all the doors and just bury myself away."

Martin, who met Paltrow, 33, backstage at a Coldplay concert in 2002, was famous before, "but music famous is a very nice famous. It's kind of cool, you know? Relationship famous is horrible. It's horrible. I'm not complaining about it. It made me think: Oh, thank goodness I'm in a band."

When he and Paltrow - who live mainly in London - married in December 2003, it drove Martin apart from his mates, whom he met while studying ancient history at the University of London in the '90s. "Not because of them, just because of me. With that new tabloid interest, none of us knew how to deal with it."

They learned to block out distractions. "We need to concentrate to make sure that our records are passionate and good, because this other stuff we have around us isn't that healthy. And it's just made us a lot closer... . I now have two things in my life I can't believe that I have: My band and my baby."

Feeling extremely

Speaking of whom: Why Apple? "Why Susie?" asks Martin. "Why Sarah? Why not Apple?"

He says her birth has affected his work. "It's made me feel everything more extremely. Good things seem better, bad things seem worse. It makes everything seem brighter, more in contrast. And the album is all about contrast. That's why it's called X&Y."

Chromosomes? Algebraic variables? "All of them," he says.

Since 2002's A Rush of Blood to the Head, the band's soft rock sound has been supplanted in the hearts of Anglophiles by a new batch of spiky, post-punk redux bands, such as Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party.

"I can't get enough of it," Martin says, with guileless enthusiasm. "They're edgier and we're softer. We need them and they need us."

Martin's married to a movie star and is a fan of Woody Allen movies (as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories), but he has no plans to embark on a film career of his own. "There's enough people that hate Coldplay already without encouraging them," he says.

For X&Y, Martin had to write about his personal life again. Although he won't comment on specific songs, it's widely assumed that "Fix You" - the second single, and "the most important song we've ever done" - is about helping Paltrow get over the 2002 death of her father, Bruce.

With the album finally coming out, Martin says he's filled with "terror and impatience."

"I only want to be the biggest band in the world if we're the best band in the world... . I don't want to get there by singing some song I hate.

"I like the idea of lots of people singing together... . My dream is to make music that does what my favorite music does for me. When you listen to it alone, you feel those emotions, like it's just there for you. Then you go into a big room and you think: Everyone else is feeling just the same as me. Because you want to feel like you're not alone in the world."

I think this is one of the most extraordinary statements I've ever read in a review. If this was a review of Rudyard Kipling or George Orwell it would make sense, but Coldplay in 2005, I think not. The empire is a distant memory, the sun has long since set. It's not something which impinges on the conciousness of most Brit's. Fear of being eclipsed by the tiger economies of the far east perhaps, but that's not something which is unique to the UK.

That said it's not a particularly groundbreaking close reading (but that's even less common).

And not one mention of Kraftwerk either. I thought he would have jumped on the "Computer Love" realignment. Must! Try! Harder! Lad!

i liked the close reading, i only wish it were tied a little less closely to the general thrust of the piece, which was almost unremittingly negative.

Spot the irony here. (hint: it's Kelefa, no H)

People who slag it off are the kind of people that think Abbey Road, Achtung Baby, and Automatic for the People are overly commercial.

People who think great melodies are crass.

People who think selling millions of cds automatically makes your music valueless.

People who think everything should sound like Autechre.

Music snobs.

Gimme a fucking break. Rock critics are morons.

The man must have WWSTS? written on his hand during interviews.

"What Would Spinal Tap Say?"

That makes many more than two of us. Read the Times stylebook, cretin.

WARM MILK
“Comfort music” sounds like an insult, no matter how you spin it. But it’s an insult that the enormously popular English quartet Coldplay is probably willing to endure, given that it has sold twenty million records filled with music that is sometimes sweet, sometimes warm, and sometimes fuzzy. And although this isn’t the kind of thing that earns critical adoration, it’s also true that Coldplay is expert at the form. Only a churl could resist their best singles: “Yellow,” a piercingly sincere bit of high-school poetry that is just as moving as they intended it to be, and the airy, hypnotic “Clocks.” Chris Martin, the affable lead vocalist, provides strong vocals that are feminine without being annoyingly sensitive, and the band’s musical landscape is soothing but not soporific, subtly packed with hooks and catchy bits.

Up until now, this has been healthy. But on Coldplay’s third album, “X&Y” (Capitol), the band has apparently caught the virus Significatio terribilis, a condition that previously afflicted bands such as U2. While Bono and his friends have always had an unusual capacity for world-encompassing bombast, Coldplay’s more modest charm doesn’t benefit from being supersized. Martin’s lyrics, once introspective mash notes, now sound like a thousand coffee-mug mottoes strung together, inspirational at first blush but completely devoid of substance. The band is like a character actor desperate for a romantic lead and pulling out all the stops. And the stops are all here: the strings, the orchestral swoops, the cavernous soundscapes. Much of the problem stems from pacing: almost every song can be classified as a ballad or, when the band is feeling especially frisky, a mid-tempo track. This is not to say that the album is entirely unappealing; a few songs, including “Speed of Sound” and “Talk” (the latter has the album’s best hook, although it’s lifted from Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love”), are successes of a sort. But what sort? Sadly, the generic sort. In the end, it’s hard to say what any of “X&Y” is about, except the fact that Martin can write a dozen songs’ worth of vaguely reassuring lyrics (“When you try your best but you don’t succeed / When you get what you want but not what you need”). There are moments of real beauty, like Jonny Buckland’s closing guitar line in “Low,” and for a moment the goosebumps start to rise. But they go down soon enough.

HOORAY! (There's not enough room for churlism in this life and no critic is my moral arbiter.)

It is, actually, pretty different from the other two. It's not a death metal record or anything, but there are sounds present that were not present on the first two albums. I got it on Saturday and was listening to it last night on the train for about the third time. It's a good album. I didn't pay any attention to the lyrics, though. Maybe if I had, the scales would have fallen from my eyes (ears?) and I could have shouted along with ILM, "Aaaaahhh, Coldplay sucks."

Personally, I don't get the anti-fuss. The album is pretty, and nowhere near as annoying as, say, Keane, the Up With People of wimpy British rock. Reminds me a good deal of Interpol, hook-wise, though no one seems to be mentioning them. But I stand by my initial reaction on another Coldplay thread that the lyrics are disturbingly banal, cliched, trite, etc. (which is arguably better than Interpol's just-plain-bad lyrics). Though it is fun to play guess the rhyme!

which, while perhaps fundamentally agreeing with, i found immediately irksome (and it wasn't the double 'most'): it's the kind of argument i see used again pop very often - "safe", "controlled", "measured". i think there's a bigger discussion about music and peceived notions of 'danger' to be had.

I think Coldplay's records are quite good at evoking big unspecified feelings but the reason I don't like them is that I think their restraint and measure often takes them into emotional territories I don't usually look to music to deal with - other real-life stress removers do it a lot better.

I find the utilitarian approach loads more useful Ned - what am I actually getting out of something? How is it affecting me, can I share it with friends, can I dance to it?

I remember when they first came about, playing their NME tour - pre-Yellow - with JJ72 and, I think, Terris (NME had JJ72 and Terris poised for world domination and Coldplay seemed to be thrown in there as an aside. Oops).

Chris Martin seemed so false back then - as if he had studied and copied the Morrissey guide to success as other Moz-wannabes have too. Right down to his, "I'm so shy/ useless with girls/ didn't lose my virginity until I was 22/ no one loved me, really/ I have it so hard" etc etc

Then when "Parachutes" exploded he had his dick in Natalie Imbruglia and it seemed like there was a bit of a masterplan going on here. Him, and him only, was the face of Coldplay... he was the guy giving interviews... he changed from the po-faced virgin to the man about town but the lyrics and sentiments of the angsty songs stayed the same - even when he was boning his Oscar winning wife.

To put it blunt - Martin never had any reason to be depressed or angsty. He still doesn't. He's a lucky bastard, which is not reason for me to hate him - not at all, more power to him. But therein lies how false all of this 'woe is me' music really is.

Plus, Coldplay led to Keane and Starsailor and The Snow Patrol which is unforgivable. It is music designed to sell to as many braindead car drivers as possible, there is no soul there, no feeling, no truth, no emotion - it is just Chris trying to out sell U2 as these interviews indicate.

And if your sole reason for making music is to out sell U2 then no wonder so man fucking people hate you, you dull ugly bastard.

Thanks

That might be cutting off Calum's nose to spite your face.

I liked the first two albums well enough and more for the pretty, facile pop acessibility than anything else but the lyrics are really mediocre and I have given up. I don't mind Martin's hypocrisy so much but the sheer snivellingness of it all is off-putting. I was a huge Smiths fan as a teen but at least Morriseey's lyrics bounced between adolescent depsair and humor. Many epithets have been hurled Chris MArtin's way, but funny ain't one of them. When I heard 'Talk' earlier this year, I knew I was never going to buy or borrow this album and it was Martin's lyrics that did it. As he crooned "Let's talk" all I could think was, "Chris, substitute the the 't' in 'Let's' with an 's' and you'd have a better idea."

If music appreciation is best understood as an interaction between the performer and the listener where the listener's role is most important, in that they read their own desires or beliefs or ideology into the music they hear, especially the music they actively seek out or buy, then what offends us about certain acts is the world-view we believe they represent. Calum succinctly summed up some of those beliefs re: Coldplay, although he did it with contradictory premises and did it because he believes in a set of groups who might just as well represent the same world-view.

Hmmm, this is getting a bit tangled. Still, Coldplay hate as rejection of domesticity? (Opposite of the endlessly f(l)ailing myth of Rebel Music?)

kelefa.

Love you lot so much when you are live in gigs? Please, please play here at Solihull/Birmingham i am getting mad.

Love Jonny Buckland's lover girl
Katie Patricia Neale Venables age 14 nearly 15 in a months time.

Will you marry me?

We shall name our first child Eustace Pear Kumquat Buckland

You sound unsure of yourself.

This is the key, actually: they are not music people, they are music rocks!