Coldplay – Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends (A Metacritical Review)

i’ve been a bit slow to getting around to reviewing this record, or getting around to review any record for that matter, so rather than rehash what’s been said a million times already i thought i’d try something different/lazy and just cut/paste my feelings for the record with a little help from metacritic. i’ll try to not make this a habit.

Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends [...] is the least Coldplay-sounding album in the band’s discography. – PopMatters

[It] isn’t a complete overhaul á la Achtung Baby or Kid A; just as they dull the sharp corners of their legendary influences musically, Coldplay offer a diluted version of the “experimental” mid-career maneuver with their fourth LP. It’s a case of well-honed troubleshooting that should keep the faithful conscious enough to appreciate its subtle improvements.- Pitchfork

this record is definitely being billed as “experimental,” but that term is very relative in this instance because “experimental” for coldplay means having an instrumental song at the beginning of their record. and yes, this makes the album sound very un-coldplay throughout, which is both a blessing and a curse. unlike the pitchfork review, i wouldn’t call coldplay’s change on viva la vida “subtle,” but it’s nice to hear that coldplay have shaken things up a bit and are at least a little interested in playing around in the grey area between art and pop, but they do so at the expense of being bland:

Part of their predicament is the production, which, as with almost any other mainstream rock band of the last 15 or so years, processes, auto-tunes, click-tracks, compresses and otherwise bleeds almost all personality out of the entire band’s sound. It could be literally anyone playing guitar, drums, bass or piano on this record, hence why I’ve not used any names other than Martin’s – the backing band are incidental. – Drowned in Sound

the band do shine at times, but there are no points at all during the album where i hear an instrument and immediately associate it to the person who is supposed to be playing it. that’s especially true for the rhythm section, who could’ve been replaced by session musicians at any point and i wouldn’t have been the wiser. coldplay are “experimental” here, but they’re also unrecognizable.

The first [major shift this record] is Martin’s voice, which is operating in a lower register; though romance has always been a big part of Coldplay’s music, sex has not. Yet in “Yes,” a trippy acoustic shuffle, Martin evinces real swagger as he laments a lover’s indecisive ways. – Spin

in that case, viva la vida could have been coldplay’s sexiest (which wouldn’t require a lot of boundaries being pushed for that to happen) because they had initially thought to include a collaboration they did with kylie minogue on the album, but dropped it from the final cut thinking it would be “too sexy.” i haven’t heard the song, but assuming that it isn’t a total travesty and maybe even resembles “where the wild roses grow” to some degree, i think that kind of sexiness is a well-needed shift for coldplay. maybe it would even have the same mind-blowing potential (in a “wow i didn’t see that one coming” kind of way) as thom yorke singing “I don’t want to be your friend/ I just want to be your lover” on “house of cards” from last year’s in rainbows. maybe, but the world doesn’t need another chris martin/thom yorke comparison, so i’ll stop there.

[...] their superstar status doesn’t take away from the fact that they still crank out some outright terrible songs on occasion, as evidenced here by tired dreck like “42” and “Violet Hill”. – PopMatters

‘42’ starts as a cod-profound piano-ballad with the god-awful lyric “those who are dead / are not dead / they’re just living in my head” and a none-more-‘Imagine’ piano fill before, after 90 seconds, drums and guitar tones that, in the context of a Coldplay record, sound a little edgy, drop in and cause a giant middle-eight-cum-chorus to swell up in support of the remarkably dumb line “you thought you might be a ghost / you didn’t get to heaven but you made it close”. – Drowned in Sound

those “edgy” bits that are mentioned do actually sound quite revelatory for coldplay, and i remember when i heard the song for the first time, it was quite exciting: the band sounded really angular and almost fierce– that is until the line “you thought you might be a ghost…”

Martin’s refined writing topics may be outpaced by the band’s guided adventure, but they’re both indicative that Coldplay are desperate to not just strive for the title of great band — a title they seem to believe that they’re to the manor born — but to actually burrow into the explorative work of creating music.- AMG

[U]nless Coldplay do produce something genuinely radical and creative they’re doomed to continue the combination of commercial success and critical indifference which seems to rile their singer even as it lines all of their pockets. – Drowned in Sound

Don’t get me wrong; to my ears, this is the group’s strongest offering yet, but since this album is the same old naive romanticism theatrically propped on a pedestal, it’s not really saying a lot. – Tiny Mix Tapes

(i prefer this original, viral version of the video to the official one thats on the music channels)

Filed under: Album Review , "where the wild roses grow", 2008, coldplay, in rainbows, kylie minogue, metacritic, nick cave & the bad seeds, thom yorke, viva la vida or death and all his friends