This past week I have been in France on holiday, and by some horrible twist of fate -- because he only usually listens to French 80's pop ballads -- my dad had bought Coldplay's latest installment, Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends. Consequently, and to my great regret, it became something of a 'soundtrack of the week' as it was played almost exclusively on a loop for the whole trip. I therefore had to do something about the thoughts nagging at me as I heard the CD again and again, hence this rant, which I promise to keep as informative and un-cathartic as possible.
So many things simply do not work in Viva La Vida, which can in short be described as Chris Martin et al.'s embarrassingly mainstream take on an arty concept album. Several features point to an attempt at edginess. There is the title itself, which purports to be an intriguing dualism, and the album cover (a painting by Eugène Delacroix), which suggests that the band are now somehow late 18th century French revolutionaries. We also find cross-referencing of musical material between songs (Life In Technicolor - Death And All His Friends), songs that flow into one another with no interruption (Life In Technicolor - Cemeteries Of London, Viva La Vida - Violet Hill), and the recurring inclusion of 2 separate songs on the same track, which happens overtly on Lovers In Japan / Reign Of Love but secretly on Yes and Death And All His Friends. In the latter, which is the final track on the album, the second song, or part, repeats the very opening of the album (which is a sample from Jon Hopkins's Light Through The Veins and is also probably the best part of Viva La Vida) but concludes it differently, this time with some murmured words about 'and in the end'. I was immediately reminded of the conclusion of the epic Abbey Road medley ('And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make'), and shuddered at the thought of Chris Martin seeing himself as some sort of modern day John Lennon. Ugghhhhhh. Enough of that.
By far my favourite of all the wacky things about this album, however, is the fact that it was recorded 'in a bakery, a nunnery, a magic shop, a church'. The band write this in the first page of the album sleeve, in what I think is their own new font called Smuggy Mc Smug Smug. One is left baffled at the reason for recording in a bakery if it comes out sounding like you recorded in a state of the art studio with an engineer who tried his best to make everything sound like U2. I know this comparison is frequently made, but honestly, listen to Lovers in Japan and tell me you aren't surprised not to hear Bono singing. See? Told you.
Coldplay: 'Lovers In Japan / Reign Of Love'
To go back to the 'double songs', in Lovers In Japan / Reign Of Love we have a track that is clearly identified as being split in two. Fine. Why not. Why always have one song to a track, right? In Death And All His Friends we have a 'secret' ending that goes back to the opening, unifying the album thematically, which actually works quite well. But the really perplexing one is Yes. In deliberately not identifying that the track is split in two the band are effectively creating another 'secret' part, and I can't help feeling that this dramatically undermines the poignancy of the final number. Having one secret ending would have been very effective indeed, surprising even. But why oh why sabotage your own punchline by telling the joke again just a few minutes before? It just all seems like a big mistake.
The other answer is to interpret both Yes and Lovers In Japan / Reign Of Love as ambitious 7 minute prog beasts, which might have been what the band thought they were making. What weak animals these would be however, seeing as they are made up of two completely different songs, with no musical relevance to each other, that are simply juxtaposed on one track. If the songs had been musically linked, or if their content was at all surprising or out of the norm, we might be praising the album for its structural ingenuity. But instead we are just left wondering "what's the point?". Coldplay have just got to be more honest with themselves -- and when they are, the results are far more convincing; indeed the single Viva La Vida is (perhaps ironically) the most successful song on the album, albeit due in part to some expressive string arrangements by Davide Rossi.
To conclude, Yes (the second part of which is finally to be identified as Chinese Sleep Chant, further obscuring what the band actually wanted to achieve with the track) expresses in a microcosm the overarching flaw with Coldplay's approach, which is that of a middle-of-the-road band masquerading as innovators. If you're going to make an epic art-prog-rock symphony then do it. But don't write two bite-sized inoffensive pop-rock songs, complete with full-on trademark chord progressions (I think we can now talk about a 'Coldplay Vadd4'), paste them together and call it a 7 minute piece. If nothing else, your listeners are going to feel a bit cheated. And if in doing so you are spoiling the most inventive thing about your whole album, well then you're a bit of a douche.
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