Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends

I’m in an unreleased album reviewing mood today. This is Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, Coldplay’s followup to 2005’s X&Y, which I found extremely disappointing. Coldplay’s first album, Parachutes, had a very vanilla piano rock sound, which was listenable and enjoyable. A Rush of Blood to the Head expanded on that sound with some harder rock incorporations, which was a good fleshing out of their sound. X&Y was disappointing because they moved in this airy, fluffy direction that I really didn’t care for. Speed of Sound was a good song, but the album was too homogeneous.

Why the brief overview of Coldplay’s previous albums? Because Viva la Vida kicks all those other albums’ asses. I don’t know what Coldplay did between X&Y and this, but we should all be extremely thankful that it happened. Coldplay is really experimenting on this one, and it comes out beautifully. All across the record, they’ve employed a much wider variety of instruments. The rhythms are also more creative, pushing the songs forward in interesting ways, instead of the usual boom-thump-boom-thump. The first track of the album starts out slow and picks up pace toward the end, pushing you to the next track, and each track does the same after that, making for a great experience just listening to the album straight through from beginning to end.

Every song on here really stands out on its own, while still contributing to the overall feel of the album, so I honestly can’t single any of them out. They’re all great. It’s extremely well made, and I can’t recommend it enough. This is a new Coldplay, and it’s undoubtedly going to alienate a lot of the fans of the older stuff. However, I am not one of those people, and Coldplay has redeemed themselves in my eyes.

Here’s the video for their first single, Violet Hill: