Colderplay

I waited a few weeks before I wanted to write a review for this album. There are very albums that you can immediately like on the first few listens. A rush of blood to the head is one such album that took numerous spins before I started identifying with it. ARoBTtH was a "bigger" album than Parachutes in terms of scope and atmosphere. Parachutes was much more organic, as first albums tend to be. Take your pick of reasons: studio costs, time, lack of knowledge, bad producers etc. Clocks embodies the big stadium songwriting that Chris martin embraced on that album. Oddly enough the first single off of X&Y is Clock's cousin. Hi Speed of Sound- meet your first cousin Clocks.
Clocks: " You stole my bassline"
Speed of Sound : " You stole my pre chorus vocal intonation"

The NY times had a great one line scathing comment on Coldplay's new album describing how the band utilizes a coldplay algorithm to mass produce the songs on X&Y...

It's abundantly apparent on most of the songs that chris is reaching for a melody that never really materializes. The slow intro, with just the vocals is the cookie cutter template for most of the songs. If you happened to catch VH1 storytellers on coldplay, you would know that coldplay based the "theme" or sound of their album on "Fix you" which is by far the worst song on the album. They were proud that they sang a 4 part harmony on the track. Big fucking deal. A four part harmony would be great if the song was actually good! The album embraces a much more "new agish" sound (see John Tesh) that really is a departure from their earlier works which took a modern rock sound to the bleeding edge ( no pun intended as John Buckland borrows from the textural guitar style made famous by Robert Smith of the Cure and the Edge from U2)
I really wanted to like this album. I'm not a professional music critic that has to distance himself from emotions and bias when doing a review. Coldplay was and still is one of my favorite bands. I hope their next effort will be more of an organic endeavor and lose the Church organs and lackluster melodies.

C+