Coldplay: Viva La Vida

I was looking forward to hating this record, it must be some reflex action that rallies against excessive commercial success. As It happened I don’t hate it, however I noticed that although playing it a number of times on it’s release it promptly fell of my radar and with the wealth of other great music released this year I for got to play it again until I came to compiling my 2008 review.

Coldplay: Parachutes

This cockney quartet from the Paralophone stable were the Bookies favorites for this years "Mercury Music Award", but were pipped at the post by Badly Drawn Boy. Even though "Parachutes" didn’t actually win, the quality of past nominees inspires a bit of pre-listening confidence. However, before handing over your hard-earned shekels to the confused and punctured individual lurking menacingly behind the HMV counter, you may well want to know what they actually sound like. I don’t have enough room to describe all of the tracks in detail here, but I will attempt to give a brief description of a few of the stand out tracks. The opening track "Don’t Panic" gets us under way in an upbeat mood, not dissimilar to last years Travis Album. "Trouble" is a slower tune more akin to the Counting Crows while the title track itself is a very short acoustic piece reminiscent of the late great Nick Drake. Other prominent tracks include "Spies", "Yellow" and "We Never Change". My wife’s first impression of the album was that it was a bit dull and inoffensive. It is indeed extremely unlikely that it will offend as many people as Slipknot or Marilyn Mansun, but inoffensive is not really a fair description of it. There is in-fact a lot more depth to the album than can be gleaned from a casual listen whilst making the dinner, you just have to sit down and listen to it properly. It contains 10 well crafted and produced traditional guitar, bass, keyboard and drum based songs. Coldplay don’t seem to have the energy, anger and angst of Nirvana but they have put together an excellent debut album of well-written and performed conventional material. In summary, "Parachutes" is in close proximity to the proverbial canine under-carriage and well worth a good hearty sniff.