The world’s most neurotic rock stars relax, shed their manias and get experimental.
Viva La Vida
Capitol
Everybody hates Chris. Radiohead fans hate him for turning their heroes’ android rock into warm baths of ballad beige. A critic from
The New York Times hates him for writing corny lyrics that “make me wish I didn’t understand English.” You know how Paul Rudd knew Seth Rogen was gay in
The 40-Year-Old Virgin? He liked Coldplay. Last August, a slight 21-year-old woman in a Seattle karaoke bar shouted, “Oh, no, not that song! I can’t stand that song!” before she attacked a man who had begun to belt out “Yellow.” The bartender said it took “three or four of us” to hold down the inflamed assailant. Such passion.
People hate Sir Paltrow for liking mushy melodies, for naming his kid after their computer, for Pottery Barn pianos, for seeming altruistic and modest yet full of himself.
Of course, there’s also a sizable chunk of Everybody who’d give their left arm and their Prius to have Coldplay as their wedding band. It’s easy to make soft rock that reassures people in anxious times (tons of Watergate-era sensitive mustache guys did that). Martin weaves his security blankets out of his anxieties—when the cushy catharsis hits, it feels more earned. And their experimental fourth album,
Viva La Vida, is about finding freedom in the scary space between the band’s lovers and haters: “It’s impossible to please everybody, and it took us a while to learn that,” Martin recently said.
Coldplay making a record about not pleasing everybody is like James Brown making a record about not being so damn funky all the time. Yet,
Viva La Vida has all the hallmarks of daring artistic independence. It was produced by Brian Eno, the catalyst behind Talking Heads’ groundbreaking early albums and the mid-’80s U2 records Martin has been falling asleep to since puberty. (Markus Dravs lent assists, too, fresh off his work with Arcade Fire.) Citing a “Hispanic” influence, the band swiped the disc’s title from a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, whose self-portraits turned her strange looks into pained beauty. It’s got a flamenco song about walking around in graveyards and North African strings on a song about being thrown off a roof that climaxes with a grinding riff apocalypse. Songs fade in and out through washes of somber electronics, firmament-stirring build-ups that disappear into black holes of silence and caustic distortion churns that actually sound like the arty ’90s Brit bands Coldplay always get attacked for pasteurizing. Confused? Coldplay were. They brought a hypnotist into the recording studio to help release their inner adventurer.
Eno uncorked a Chris Martin dying to explore the epic issues of isolation and ego only a rock royal can truly appreciate. “You might be a big fish in a little pond/Doesn’t mean you’ve won,” he reminds himself (and all us little fishes too) in “Lost!” as a radiant church organ shines on a portentously booming beat. Martin has always been obsessed with celebrity and its discontents, but here he nearly goes loco pulling at the foundations of his high castle. On “Cemeteries of London” he meets God in a garden and doesn’t know what He said, and on “Viva La Vida” he imagines himself a deposed tyrant wandering the streets of the city he once ruled (“just a puppet on a lonely string”).
Hey, that’s tough, buddy. Bizarrely, however,
Viva La Vida still manages to seem downsized compared to the band’s grandiose early work. At 47 minutes, its abstract noodling and Travel Channel dabbling go by more like a series of intriguingly grainy snapshots, rather than wall hangings of cathedral ceilings. And when the jarring, exotic sounds push Martin to shake off the grumpies and find the secret cure for his malaise (love, people, the answer is love), he sounds like a God-encountering rich guy you might want to have a beer with. Just strings and piano, “Reign of Love” is the kind of ambient lullaby U2 and Eno used to write; it’s tender, soft but not simpy and, despite entrances of wind and fire, humbly restrained. “Strawberry Swing” is its prettiest song, with shimmering African guitars refracting through a waltz and lyrics about blue skies and perfect days and not wasting life complaining about how you’re wasting life. When the Paul Rudd guy hears it at the Seth Rogen guy’s wedding, he’ll tear up a little. In a totally-not-gay way, of course.
Download “Yes,” “Reign of Love,” “Lost!” “Strawberry Swing”