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Worldwide Coldplay

A worldlier Coldplay take a different approach.

Coldplay

Viva la Vida or Death and all His Friends

Released on Jun 17, 2008

If you want a simple summary of Coldplay's ridiculously anticipated fourth album, Viva la Vida or Death and all His Friends, look no further than its cover. There you will find an image and a title that foreshadow the growth the band has made since 2006's underwhelming X&Y. The album art steals Eugene Delacroix's famous "Liberty Leading the People" painting, which depicts an anthropomorphized, bare-breasted female version of liberty leading French peasants in a revolt against the monarchy in 1830.

Meanwhile, the first half of the title—the Viva la Vida part—is a nod to a famous painting by the Mexican-born Frida Kahlo and translates literally to "Live the life." The intersection between Delacroix and Kahlo is an apt place to dive into an album that works so hard to integrate a global sound into the Britpop formula that made Coldplay such a phenomenon in the first place.

To that end, the band makes good use of their worldwide success. They recorded in landmark Latin churches while touring South America, explored new instruments in Barcelona, and picked up a healthy dose of Eastern spiritualism while trekking through Asia. It would be easy to assume that all of these influences make the album a dense cluster fuck of noise, but just the opposite is true. It's refreshingly open and free of the claustrophobic feeling that made X&Y feel like such a chore at times. "Life in Technicolor" starts with nearly two minutes of swelling guitars - an obvious reference to U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" - before the album launches into tracks like "Lost!", which is built around a church pipe organ and a group hand-clap, and "Yes", which features more Africanized rhythm than you're going to see on any other Top 40 album this year.

Perhaps the best thing about Viva la Vida is that the band has finally broken away from the piano intro-verse-chorus-verse-piano interlude-chorus structure that has defined so much of their output. "Lovers in Japan" starts out as a propulsive ballad about lovers "dreaming of the Osaka sun," before shifting into the lilting "Reign of Love" which ends the track. The same goes for "Yes," which begins as a dark, mid-tempo number in which lead singer Chris Martin foregoes his trademark falsetto for a lower, more affecting register. But it ends with the "hidden" track "Chinese Sleep Chant" - a three minute chant that seems to grow more peaceful the louder it gets. For a band that has occasionally been accused of recycling music, these alterations in sound and song writing, even when subtle, are a welcome change.

With album art that references peasant riots and lyrics like "I hear Jerusalem bells a-ringin' / Roman calvery choirs are singin'" and "For some reason I can't explain / I know St. Peter will call my name," ("Viva la Vida"), many critics have tried to argue that Martin and company are trying to get away from the inner-monologue styling (ahem, "Yellow") that made them popular by putting their emotions in a broader context. And to some degree that may be true. But you only need to look to the album's last and best track, "Death and All His Friends", to understand that the world-wide influences and newfound historicism are there to compliment what makes the band appealing in the first place. In the end, after cycling through Chinese dream worlds, French uprisings and Latin churches, Martin finds himself looking inward yet again: "No I don't want to battle from beginning to end / I don't want a cycle of recycled revenge / I don't want to follow death and all of his friends." It's Coldplay's ability to take something interior like the notion of death, and turn it into a sort of universal melody that makes this album refreshing, accomplished, and surprisingly cathartic. It's exactly the sort of thing they need to do more of in the future.

Posted by Ryan Peters on Jun 21, 2008 @ 9:01 pm

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