Coldplay - X&Y
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craig
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Harryz said:
Coldplay basically 15 months pissing about tweaking songs and 3 months solid recording. Talk was originally done in that 15 month time frame and after it leaked Chris re-worked it and re-wrote the lyrics.
Not sure which one I prefer tbh.
craig
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For anyone that's interested on understanding what Harryz is on about here you go:
http://rapidshare.de/files/2178360/chris_does_the_crazy_frog.mp3.html
Mods, don't delete this.. it isn't a song.. its a radio interview clip.
http://rapidshare.de/files/2178360/chris_does_the_crazy_frog.mp3.html
Mods, don't delete this.. it isn't a song.. its a radio interview clip.
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It wasn't my choice! Out of them all i thought a message was lowly rated i would give it a 4/5 definately, my 3rd fav song!craig said:Oh my word. I can't believe you rated my favourite song (A Message) so low
Lets see if Play.com are gonna dick me on this album too... or maybe I'll recive it by Monday? We'll see...
I've never heard him do the crazy frog thing before, but it went down on Jonathon Ross
I'm actually listening to Radio 2 now, and its all about coldplay's rise to the top and the band members talking about X&Y. Their first song is on now, if you wanna listen click here now (only for the next 45 minutes though then you miss out!)
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Btw coldplay are on virgin radio now talking through every track on the album, cracking some funny jokes and playing their songs. Im having a real ball listening. On track 5 now of 13, so tune in now or miss out forever.
www.virginradio.co.uk
http://www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/listen/index.html
www.virginradio.co.uk
http://www.virginradio.co.uk/thestation/listen/index.html
ComradeBadger
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I could never stand Speed of Sound or Clocks.. but as a general rule, liked the rest of the album (Rush of Blood to the Head) .. haven't heard X & Y in full so far, but we had it on at work the other day.. and I just thought 'meh', it's just.. not very interesting...
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Rush Of Blood To The Head is one of my favourite songs of all times (and Amsterdam). After listening the album for a day (about 10 times) I'm afraid, that something went wrong. Not terribly wrong, the album is quite enjoyable but I can't identify with any of the songs. Well, maybe Til Kingdom Come. That's pure Coldplay.
stemot
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And So, The backlash begins:-
New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/arts/music/05pare.html?pagewanted=1&incamp=article_popular_3
The Case Against Coldplay
THERE'S nothing wrong with self-pity. As a spur to songwriting, it's right up there with lust, anger and greed, and probably better than the remaining deadly sins. There's nothing wrong, either, with striving for musical grandeur, using every bit of skill and studio illusion to create a sound large enough to get lost in. Male sensitivity, a quality that's under siege in a pop culture full of unrepentant bullying and machismo, shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, no matter how risible it can be in practice. And building a sound on the lessons of past bands is virtually unavoidable.
This week Coldplay releases its painstakingly recorded third album, "X&Y" (Capitol), a virtually surefire blockbuster that has corporate fortunes riding on it. (The stock price plunged for EMI Group, Capitol's parent company, when Coldplay announced that the album's release date would be moved from February to June, as it continued to rework the songs.)
"X&Y" is the work of a band that's acutely conscious of the worldwide popularity it cemented with its 2002 album, "A Rush of Blood to the Head," which has sold three million copies in the United States alone. Along with its 2000 debut album, "Parachutes," Coldplay claims sales of 20 million albums worldwide. "X&Y" makes no secret of grand ambition.
Clearly, Coldplay is beloved: by moony high school girls and their solace-seeking parents, by hip-hop producers who sample its rich instrumental sounds and by emo rockers who admire Chris Martin's heart-on-sleeve lyrics. The band emanates good intentions, from Mr. Martin's political statements to lyrics insisting on its own benevolence. Coldplay is admired by everyone - everyone except me.
It's not for lack of skill. The band proffers melodies as imposing as Romanesque architecture, solid and symmetrical. Mr. Martin on keyboards, Jonny Buckland on guitar, Guy Berryman on bass and Will Champion on drums have mastered all the mechanics of pop songwriting, from the instrumental hook that announces nearly every song they've recorded to the reassurance of a chorus to the revitalizing contrast of a bridge. Their arrangements ascend and surge, measuring out the song's yearning and tension, cresting and easing back and then moving toward a chiming resolution. Coldplay is meticulously unified, and its songs have been rigorously cleared of anything that distracts from the musical drama.
Unfortunately, all that sonic splendor orchestrates Mr. Martin's voice and lyrics. He places his melodies near the top of his range to sound more fragile, so the tunes straddle the break between his radiant tenor voice and his falsetto. As he hops between them - in what may be Coldplay's most annoying tic - he makes a sound somewhere between a yodel and a hiccup. And the lyrics can make me wish I didn't understand English. Coldplay's countless fans seem to take comfort when Mr. Martin sings lines like, "Is there anybody out there who / Is lost and hurt and lonely too," while a strummed acoustic guitar telegraphs his aching sincerity. Me, I hear a passive-aggressive blowhard, immoderately proud as he flaunts humility. "I feel low," he announces in the chorus of "Low," belied by the peak of a crescendo that couldn't be more triumphant about it.
In its early days, Coldplay could easily be summed up as Radiohead minus Radiohead's beat, dissonance or arty subterfuge. Both bands looked to the overarching melodies of 1970's British rock and to the guitar dynamics of U2, and Mr. Martin had clearly heard both Bono's delivery and the way Radiohead's Thom Yorke stretched his voice to the creaking point.
Unlike Radiohead, though, Coldplay had no interest in being oblique or barbed. From the beginning, Coldplay's songs topped majesty with moping: "We're sinking like stones," Mr. Martin proclaimed. Hardly alone among British rock bands as the 1990's ended, Coldplay could have been singing not only about private sorrows but also about the final sunset on the British empire: the old opulence meeting newly shrunken horizons. Coldplay's songs wallowed happily in their unhappiness.
Am I a part of the cure / Or am I part of the disease," Mr. Martin pondered in "Clocks" on "A Rush of Blood to the Head." Actually, he's contagious. Particularly in its native England, Coldplay has spawned a generation of one-word bands - Athlete, Embrace, Keane, Starsailor, Travis and Aqualung among them - that are more than eager to follow through on Coldplay's tremulous, ringing anthems of insecurity. The emulation is spreading overseas to bands like the Perishers from Sweden and the American band Blue Merle, which tries to be Coldplay unplugged.
A band shouldn't necessarily be blamed for its imitators - ask the Cure or the Grateful Dead. But Coldplay follow-throughs are redundant; from the beginning, Coldplay has verged on self-parody. When he moans his verses, Mr. Martin can sound so sorry for himself that there's hardly room to sympathize for him, and when he's not mixing metaphors, he fearlessly slings clichés. "Are you lost or incomplete," Mr. Martin sings in "Talk," which won't be cited in any rhyming dictionaries. "Do you feel like a puzzle / you can't find your missing piece."
Coldplay reached its musical zenith with the widely sampled piano arpeggios that open "Clocks": a passage that rings gladly and, as it descends the scale and switches from major to minor chords, turns incipiently mournful. Of course, it's followed by plaints: "Tides that I tried to swim against / Brought me down upon my knees."
On "X&Y," Coldplay strives to carry the beauty of "Clocks" across an entire album - not least in its first single, "Speed of Sound," which isn't the only song on the album to borrow the "Clocks" drumbeat. The album is faultless to a fault, with instrumental tracks purged of any glimmer of human frailty. There is not an unconsidered or misplaced note on "X&Y," and every song (except the obligatory acoustic "hidden track" at the end, which is still by no means casual) takes place on a monumental soundstage.
As Coldplay's recording budgets have grown, so have its reverberation times. On "X&Y," it plays as if it can already hear the songs echoing across the world. "Square One," which opens the album, actually begins with guitar notes hinting at the cosmic fanfare of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (and "2001: A Space Odyssey"). Then Mr. Martin, never someone to evade the obvious, sings about "the space in which we're traveling."
As a blockbuster band, Coldplay is now looking over its shoulder at titanic predecessors like U2, Pink Floyd and the Beatles, pilfering freely from all of them. It also looks to an older legacy; in many songs, organ chords resonate in the spaces around Mr. Martin's voice, insisting on churchly reverence.
As Coldplay's music has grown more colossal, its lyrics have quietly made a shift on "X&Y." On previous albums, Mr. Martin sang mostly in the first person, confessing to private vulnerabilities. This time, he sings a lot about "you": a lover, a brother, a random acquaintance. He has a lot of pronouncements and advice for all of them: "You just want somebody listening to what you say," and "Every step that you take could be your biggest mistake," and "Maybe you'll get what you wanted, maybe you'll stumble upon it" and "You don't have to be alone." It's supposed to be compassionate, empathetic, magnanimous, inspirational. But when the music swells up once more with tremolo guitars and chiming keyboards, and Mr. Martin's voice breaks for the umpteenth time, it sounds like hokum to me.
And This one I just got from over at one of the Coldplay forums:-
Coldplay - X & Y- EMI
OVERVIEW
Coldplay, perhaps you've heard of them. Chris Martin and the boys - I mean, who are they really) - are either the saviours of rock, as critics comparing them to U2 and the Beatles, would like you to think, or just another over-hyped group taking Radioheads vision into very commercial terrain.
HIT FACTOR
The one sheet that came with the advance of the disc noted how much the group wanted to use the full power of the studio. Even if that really meant "we had no ideas, so we glossed 'em over really, really well," this CD would sell, sell, sell.
BEST TRACK
"White Shadows" and "Speed Of Sound" manage to generate some of the excitement that songs such as "Spies" and "Clocks" had. "Fix You" is a love song, it's written by somebody with a Messiah complex. When did these guys commit 100% into mid-tempo ballad band?
LINER LESSONS
In lieu of lyrics, some off-focus photos and groovy colour graphics are included. It's probably a good idea when the best lines you can manage are "How long do I have to climb, up on this mountain side of mine?" Uh, try driving your ego.
BEST FOR
Stick to the first two discs. Apparently, this is a junior slump.
BOTTOM LINE
So calculated and uninspired that you won't want to play it at all.
GRADE
C-
From another US tabloid, dunno which one though
New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/arts/music/05pare.html?pagewanted=1&incamp=article_popular_3
The Case Against Coldplay
THERE'S nothing wrong with self-pity. As a spur to songwriting, it's right up there with lust, anger and greed, and probably better than the remaining deadly sins. There's nothing wrong, either, with striving for musical grandeur, using every bit of skill and studio illusion to create a sound large enough to get lost in. Male sensitivity, a quality that's under siege in a pop culture full of unrepentant bullying and machismo, shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, no matter how risible it can be in practice. And building a sound on the lessons of past bands is virtually unavoidable.
This week Coldplay releases its painstakingly recorded third album, "X&Y" (Capitol), a virtually surefire blockbuster that has corporate fortunes riding on it. (The stock price plunged for EMI Group, Capitol's parent company, when Coldplay announced that the album's release date would be moved from February to June, as it continued to rework the songs.)
"X&Y" is the work of a band that's acutely conscious of the worldwide popularity it cemented with its 2002 album, "A Rush of Blood to the Head," which has sold three million copies in the United States alone. Along with its 2000 debut album, "Parachutes," Coldplay claims sales of 20 million albums worldwide. "X&Y" makes no secret of grand ambition.
Clearly, Coldplay is beloved: by moony high school girls and their solace-seeking parents, by hip-hop producers who sample its rich instrumental sounds and by emo rockers who admire Chris Martin's heart-on-sleeve lyrics. The band emanates good intentions, from Mr. Martin's political statements to lyrics insisting on its own benevolence. Coldplay is admired by everyone - everyone except me.
It's not for lack of skill. The band proffers melodies as imposing as Romanesque architecture, solid and symmetrical. Mr. Martin on keyboards, Jonny Buckland on guitar, Guy Berryman on bass and Will Champion on drums have mastered all the mechanics of pop songwriting, from the instrumental hook that announces nearly every song they've recorded to the reassurance of a chorus to the revitalizing contrast of a bridge. Their arrangements ascend and surge, measuring out the song's yearning and tension, cresting and easing back and then moving toward a chiming resolution. Coldplay is meticulously unified, and its songs have been rigorously cleared of anything that distracts from the musical drama.
Unfortunately, all that sonic splendor orchestrates Mr. Martin's voice and lyrics. He places his melodies near the top of his range to sound more fragile, so the tunes straddle the break between his radiant tenor voice and his falsetto. As he hops between them - in what may be Coldplay's most annoying tic - he makes a sound somewhere between a yodel and a hiccup. And the lyrics can make me wish I didn't understand English. Coldplay's countless fans seem to take comfort when Mr. Martin sings lines like, "Is there anybody out there who / Is lost and hurt and lonely too," while a strummed acoustic guitar telegraphs his aching sincerity. Me, I hear a passive-aggressive blowhard, immoderately proud as he flaunts humility. "I feel low," he announces in the chorus of "Low," belied by the peak of a crescendo that couldn't be more triumphant about it.
In its early days, Coldplay could easily be summed up as Radiohead minus Radiohead's beat, dissonance or arty subterfuge. Both bands looked to the overarching melodies of 1970's British rock and to the guitar dynamics of U2, and Mr. Martin had clearly heard both Bono's delivery and the way Radiohead's Thom Yorke stretched his voice to the creaking point.
Unlike Radiohead, though, Coldplay had no interest in being oblique or barbed. From the beginning, Coldplay's songs topped majesty with moping: "We're sinking like stones," Mr. Martin proclaimed. Hardly alone among British rock bands as the 1990's ended, Coldplay could have been singing not only about private sorrows but also about the final sunset on the British empire: the old opulence meeting newly shrunken horizons. Coldplay's songs wallowed happily in their unhappiness.
Am I a part of the cure / Or am I part of the disease," Mr. Martin pondered in "Clocks" on "A Rush of Blood to the Head." Actually, he's contagious. Particularly in its native England, Coldplay has spawned a generation of one-word bands - Athlete, Embrace, Keane, Starsailor, Travis and Aqualung among them - that are more than eager to follow through on Coldplay's tremulous, ringing anthems of insecurity. The emulation is spreading overseas to bands like the Perishers from Sweden and the American band Blue Merle, which tries to be Coldplay unplugged.
A band shouldn't necessarily be blamed for its imitators - ask the Cure or the Grateful Dead. But Coldplay follow-throughs are redundant; from the beginning, Coldplay has verged on self-parody. When he moans his verses, Mr. Martin can sound so sorry for himself that there's hardly room to sympathize for him, and when he's not mixing metaphors, he fearlessly slings clichés. "Are you lost or incomplete," Mr. Martin sings in "Talk," which won't be cited in any rhyming dictionaries. "Do you feel like a puzzle / you can't find your missing piece."
Coldplay reached its musical zenith with the widely sampled piano arpeggios that open "Clocks": a passage that rings gladly and, as it descends the scale and switches from major to minor chords, turns incipiently mournful. Of course, it's followed by plaints: "Tides that I tried to swim against / Brought me down upon my knees."
On "X&Y," Coldplay strives to carry the beauty of "Clocks" across an entire album - not least in its first single, "Speed of Sound," which isn't the only song on the album to borrow the "Clocks" drumbeat. The album is faultless to a fault, with instrumental tracks purged of any glimmer of human frailty. There is not an unconsidered or misplaced note on "X&Y," and every song (except the obligatory acoustic "hidden track" at the end, which is still by no means casual) takes place on a monumental soundstage.
As Coldplay's recording budgets have grown, so have its reverberation times. On "X&Y," it plays as if it can already hear the songs echoing across the world. "Square One," which opens the album, actually begins with guitar notes hinting at the cosmic fanfare of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (and "2001: A Space Odyssey"). Then Mr. Martin, never someone to evade the obvious, sings about "the space in which we're traveling."
As a blockbuster band, Coldplay is now looking over its shoulder at titanic predecessors like U2, Pink Floyd and the Beatles, pilfering freely from all of them. It also looks to an older legacy; in many songs, organ chords resonate in the spaces around Mr. Martin's voice, insisting on churchly reverence.
As Coldplay's music has grown more colossal, its lyrics have quietly made a shift on "X&Y." On previous albums, Mr. Martin sang mostly in the first person, confessing to private vulnerabilities. This time, he sings a lot about "you": a lover, a brother, a random acquaintance. He has a lot of pronouncements and advice for all of them: "You just want somebody listening to what you say," and "Every step that you take could be your biggest mistake," and "Maybe you'll get what you wanted, maybe you'll stumble upon it" and "You don't have to be alone." It's supposed to be compassionate, empathetic, magnanimous, inspirational. But when the music swells up once more with tremolo guitars and chiming keyboards, and Mr. Martin's voice breaks for the umpteenth time, it sounds like hokum to me.
And This one I just got from over at one of the Coldplay forums:-
Coldplay - X & Y- EMI
OVERVIEW
Coldplay, perhaps you've heard of them. Chris Martin and the boys - I mean, who are they really) - are either the saviours of rock, as critics comparing them to U2 and the Beatles, would like you to think, or just another over-hyped group taking Radioheads vision into very commercial terrain.
HIT FACTOR
The one sheet that came with the advance of the disc noted how much the group wanted to use the full power of the studio. Even if that really meant "we had no ideas, so we glossed 'em over really, really well," this CD would sell, sell, sell.
BEST TRACK
"White Shadows" and "Speed Of Sound" manage to generate some of the excitement that songs such as "Spies" and "Clocks" had. "Fix You" is a love song, it's written by somebody with a Messiah complex. When did these guys commit 100% into mid-tempo ballad band?
LINER LESSONS
In lieu of lyrics, some off-focus photos and groovy colour graphics are included. It's probably a good idea when the best lines you can manage are "How long do I have to climb, up on this mountain side of mine?" Uh, try driving your ego.
BEST FOR
Stick to the first two discs. Apparently, this is a junior slump.
BOTTOM LINE
So calculated and uninspired that you won't want to play it at all.
GRADE
C-
From another US tabloid, dunno which one though
craig
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The top reviewer is a ****ing idiot, which is the case for most of the reviews that aim to remain totally negative.
I mean as far as he/she is concerned Coldplay spawned the likes of Travis, Embrace, etc ROFL and they've all been around longer!
I mean as far as he/she is concerned Coldplay spawned the likes of Travis, Embrace, etc ROFL and they've all been around longer!
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It may be his opinion...but its wrong. Some of the things he says just make no sense. Incase didnt realise speed of sound is already massive. Most songs on there will do really well making this album flourish. Although that review just is alot of pony and trap. Its just an american perspective on an english band, sometimes they just can't understand certain things we like. e.g. comedy and music.
stemot
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Hectic Glenn said:
An opinion isn`t wrong or right, just cos you think it`s the best thing since sliced bread, doesn`t make you right either.
Speed Of Sound definatley isn`t massive, it sold around around 19,000 which is pretty poor for a comeback single.
Yes the album will do well, break records etc, but I really believe that after this albums hype die down this album will be remembered as, musically, the weakest Coldplay album.
Just because his opinion of the album is poor doesn`t make it wrong, I`d also brace yourself for alot more of these, their are alot more poor reviews like this one cropping up, and although if you like the music you really shouldn`t give a shit what other people think and just enjoy it, if you don`t like it then you feel the need to warn people against the same mistake that you, in your opinion made.
Narcolepsy
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It makes such a good story to bash the CD that everyone thinks is the savior of mankind.
And that can explain half of these reviews.
And that can explain half of these reviews.
craig
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I remember the same negative reviews when Be Here Now came out, which ironically was the same day my GCSE results were published. Anyway I thought "**** the reviews", went and got my results, then nipped to town to pick up the CD and to this day I think it's the third best Oasis album regardless of what other people say.
stemot is right, the only oppinion that really matters is your own.
stemot is right, the only oppinion that really matters is your own.
stemot
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craig said:
Be Here Now is the album which converted me from the "hate the Gallaghers, they are cocky gits" stable to the "blimey, Oasis are amazing" stable, so I can`t really bad mouth it at all.
I do think DBTT is a better more consistant album, but I will always like the album contrary to the press conception of it, and if you talk to people who have heard it, they generally agree that it gets a bad rap for no reason.
CrazyHarij
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I think most of Coldplays songs are very good, but when I listened to a concert aired on the radio it struck me how similar all of them are. Some of them almost seem to be identical..
stemot
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CrazyHarij said:
Which is my main critism of this album, Speed Of Sound is basically Clocks Redux, and many of the songs on the album merge into each other. Well done to them though for getting number one, but also to Oasis, for staying at two, above the White Stripes new album no less, very unusual for an Oasis album not to slip right down.
Heh, at least there`s a bit of sense at the top of the album charts for now anyway.
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a message - one of the only good songs on the album. i absolutely adored the first two albums, but like stated above - "meh". i knew this would happen. There was no way they could put out three amazing albums back-to-back-to-back. no way. and i don't think they did. I still love "a message" though. sure, others will absolutely love this album, but i don't.
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