The Beginning of the Abyss?

X & Y Coldplay Review.

O dear. This could be the beginning of the end. The great thing about the first two Coldplay records was their freshness. Here, at last, was a young band with someone in there – I presume Chris Martin – who had the ability to write timeless music, a trick beyond bands of roughly equal commercial stature such as – you can start throwing rocks right now – REM and U2. Parachutes remains the best ‘first record' since Steely Dan made Can't Buy a Thrill in 1972, a distinction achieved thanks to great melodies and chord progressions and a perfect simplicity of presentation. A Rush of Blood To the Head was both development and regression: the sound of the record is clean and marvellous throughout, and with “Clocks” a perfect unity of sound was uncannily achieved that mesmerised fans and sucked in the interest of several thousand ad agency creatives and TV producers around the world for the next two years. But dangerously, the move to a more orchestrated approach to arrangement opened up one very awkward question: does Coldplay possess the musical talent to sustain this kind of ambitious approach to music making. On the evidence of X & Y , the answer is emphatically ‘no.'

Ironically, X &Y 's lurch into the big sonic territory of U2 isn't the problem: indeed, “Square One,” the opener with the stabbing guitar accompaniment so characteristic of The Edge, is the most successful track. When Martin (or whoever) produces a chord sequence that manages to avoid cliché, that massive ocean of noise is glorious. But too often the writing is pedestrian. “Talk,” the track the critics are chattering incessantly about because of the band's acknowledged debt to their beloved Kraftwerk, is dismal for the flat banality of the composition. “A Message” is another example. Here Martin has taken a favourite hymn, the magisterial “My Song Is Love Unknown,” and reduced it to something ordinary through an uninspired choice of chord selection.

Martin might be admirably the most open, honest and self-critical songwriter of this and any other generation, but he has personally given X & Y its third critical problem: lyric writing of an almost shocking mediocrity. If he is to be taken seriously as a major player in the songwriting field, he has to do better than Light will guide you home/and ignite your bones ( “Fix You”) and You and me are drifting into out of space together (X & Y).

As for influences, the rest of you can bang on about Radiohead, U2 and Kraftwerk, but for those of us with long memories can hear Wings (in “X&Y”), Jackson Browne (on the “The Hardest Part” and, astonishingly, the unmistakable sound of Yes at the end of “White Shadows.” Nothing wrong with that. The grey hairs who can be seen at Coldplay gigs who know the band will have spotted immediately, the cop, probably accidental, from 1975's magnificent Relayer album of 1975, and will smile every time they hear those cathedral organ chords, organised by Eno, no less. Less specifically, the big sonic landscapes created here are alarmingly reminiscent of the Simple Minds that hit the skids when they unaccountably figured that big throbbing stadium noise was the way forward.

However, to more cheerful news. This is not a bad album - far from it. Of the twelve cuts, six are worth salvaging for some future boxed set. “The Hardest Part” and the immediately following “Swallowed By The Sea” both see Martin demonstrating ample musical gifts and both prove that where his voice, rather than the towering arrangement, are placed dead centre of the music, Coldplay are still a great band. Conversely, “Square One “ and “Low” stand as examples of the band reaching for orchestral rock and getting away with it, both times because of inventive writing, especially in the latter's I feel low refrain, where Martin surprisingly manages to force his world weariness to cut through despite the big sound around him. The former is great, meanwhile, thanks to the rare decision to ditch the predictable and occasional lumpen 4/4 rhythm for something much more interesting and involving. That said, “White Shadows,” despite being bedogged by this problem, is a beaut thanks to the fabulous soaring of the sort of harmonic expertise in the writing that sees the wrong half of the album to sink into the mire. It's also this sort of skill that gives this disappointed fan something to clutch on to when considering the Coldplay future.

So what of this future? X & Y is the product of a hugely ambitious leader who is in the middle of an existential jam. It may be simplistic, but fame and fortune appears to have skewed his perspective, or put such pressure on him that his lyric writing is falling apart. He also appears to be surrounded by three musicians who he has continue to outgrow and who, if we're going to be brutal, never had that much to offer in the first place. The bass lines here are all musically monosyllabic and the guitarist desperately limited technically. Coldplay are now in a place where the ambition of their records requires a level of playing that is clearly way beyond that which Champion and Buckland are capable. The climaxes of both “Fix You” and more crucially, the record's final statement, “Twisted Logic,” are dragged back and weighed down with blunderbuss playing. No amount of volume control pushing or mod studio FX can disguise the embarrassing absence of technique. For those of us who loved the first two records, this is heartbreaking, but it has to be faced.

Here is the challenge for Chris Martin. He is fiercely loyal to the guys he formed the band with at University College, London, but to reach anything approaching his full development as an artist, he needs to cut free, and do it as soon as he possibly can. He has a warm, expressive, immediately recognisable voice which will improve with age. He also has a fearless ambition to be the best at what he does. But if this means only continuing his well-self-publicised aim in trying to topple U2 with his four-piece band, then this is a career that will stutter badly, and ultimately, could, artistically at least, fail catastrophically. Martin is an important man, who for the sake of music coming out of the UK especially, must not fail, but who, on the evidence of this record, all too easily could.