Whatever iciness there is to the sound of Viva la Vida is warmed by Martin’s voice, but the music is by design an heir to the earnest British art rock of ‘80s Peter Gabriel and U2 – arty enough to convey sober intelligence without seeming snobby, the kind of album that deserves to take its title from Frida Kahlo and album art from Eugene Delacroix. This reliance on elliptical melodies isn’t off-putting – alienation is alien to Coldplay – and this is where Eno’s guidance pays off, as he helps sculpt Viva la Vida to work as a musical whole, where there are long stretches of instrumentals and where only “Strawberry Swing,” with its light, gently infectious melody and insistent rhythmic pulse, breaks from the album’s appealingly meditative murk. In fact, there are no insistent hooks to be found anywhere on Viva la Vida, and there are no clear singles in this collection of insinuatingly ingratiating songs.
Gone too are simpering schoolboy ballads like “Fix You,” and along with them the soaring melodies designed to fill arenas. Gone are Chris Martin’s piano recitals and gone are the washes of meticulously majestic guitar, replaced by orchestrations of sound, sometimes literally consisting of strings but usually a tapestry of synthesizers, percussion, organs, electronics, and guitars that avoid playing riffs. They wind up with the same self-styled grandiosity they’ve just found a more interesting way to get to the same point.
And yet this gentle encouragement – he’s almost a kindly uncle giving his nephews permission to rummage through his study – pays great dividends for Coldplay, as it winds up changing the specifics without altering the core. With his big-budget production, Eno has a knack for amplifying an artist’s personality, as he allows bands to be just as risky as they want to be – which is quite a lot in the case of U2 and James and even Paul Simon, but not quite so much with Coldplay. In his hands, this most staid of bands looks to shake things up, albeit politely, but such good manners are so inherent to Coldplay’s DNA that they remain courteous even when they experiment. Eno pushes them, not necessarily to experiment but rather to focus and refine, to not leave their comfort zone but to find some tremulous discomfort within it. Hiring Brian Eno to produce the bulk of their fourth album, Viva la Vida, is another matter entirely. When Coldplay sampled Kraftwerk on their third album, X&Y, it was a signifier for the British band, telegraphing their classicist good taste while signaling how they prefer the eternally hip to the truly adventurous it was stylish window dressing for soft arena rock. Audio > FLAC Coldplay - Viva la Vida vinylĬoldplay - Viva la Vida (2008) vinyl
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