Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 06/06/05
Label: Parlophone

Looking back, the rise and rise of Coldplay and bands who sound like Coldplay was one of the new millennium's more predictable events. It happened pretty much the moment Radiohead went 'weird'. That was when a gap appeared in the market. With "Kid A"'s birth there was a sudden vacancy for the type of melodic comedown dinner party angst that Thom Yorke & co had previously got sown up. Thus, Chris Martin effortlessly slipped into Yorke's Hush Puppies and the whole wide world went yellow.

What made Coldplay distinct from the other pretenders was Martin's ability to pen a tune. He may have acted like a vicar's son and seemed an unlikely breed of macrobiotic pop star, but anyone who could write songs like "Yellow" or "The Scientist" or "Clocks" was always going to piss on accusations that he was some kind of student bedwetter. Without doubt, Martin is one of the most reliably melodious songwriters of his generation.

Unfortunately, nowadays that gift comes with great burdens, not least of them financial. The Sony/BMG merger saw the music industry contract to just four major companies. The upshot is that Coldplay now find themselves among a select handful of artists on whom a shrunken industry relies. For all Martin's sniping about the evil of shareholders, Coldplay are as much an economic brand than a rock band. Art barely comes into it. Noticeably, when news broke that "X&Y"'s release was going to be delayed, EMI's share price dipped alarmingly.

But fortunately for the beancounters, "X&Y" is an extremely conservative album. Certainly, Chris Martin's pre-release talk of Bowie-style experimentation is conspicuous by its absence. Not that that's totally his fault. Where The Thin White Duke could f*ck off to Berlin and snort breakfast bowls of cocaine with Iggy Pop, Martin has an obligation to shift serious units. Risk taking is simply not an option. The sole concession to artrock is the much-discussed "Talk" which half-inches the riff from Kraftwerk's "Computer Love" and incorporates it into - shock horror - a driving U2-friendly rocker.

But that's not to say this is a bad record. On the contrary, "X & Y" is easily Coldplay's most consistent album, albeit one that operates within restrictive boundaries of creativity. Pretty much a 50/50 split of muscular guitar histrionics (opener "Square One", "White Shadows" and "Low" could easily have The Edge guesting) mixed with Chris Martin's thumbs-up soppy side ("A Message" starts with the immortal line: "This song is love…") it's almost clinically honed to inspire stadiums of good natured Europeans to wave lighters in the air, which, one presumes, was pretty much the point. On the tumultuous closer "Twisted Logic" and 'hidden track' "'Til Kingdom Come" (written for Johnny Cash) it's even genuinely affecting.

Appealing, as he has to, to a demographic of 15-50 year-olds, such moments are minor miracles. When watered-down pretenders like Keane are considered even vaguely left-field, and the nearest competition comes from the truly awful Razorlight, it's not hard to see why Coldplay still matter. But against history, which is where they want to be judged, they still look like footnotes. Which is why "X&Y" is a great Coldplay album, maybe the greatest they'll ever write, but it's no "Low" and it's probably not even a "Joshua Tree". It's simply a case of too much commerce and not enough risk. In a year it'll probably be £7.99 in HMV and you'll wonder what all the fuss was about.

    by Adam Webb