Coldplay
X & Y

THE REVIEW

What sense does a new Coldplay album have today? Very little, if you think about the saturation of that genre which, in hindsight, was defined as intelligent (brit)pop, something that fed equally on "Grace," "The Bends," and "Automatic for the People," with a completely English attitude.
The success of these bands remains a mystery: Chris Martin is a good guy, he's reserved, doesn't act like a diva, he's politically correct; but this flood of graceful melodies, gentle arpeggios, and voices in perpetual whisper, these Embrace and these Travis, these Hopes of the States and these Keane, these The Dears, Thirteen Senses, Antony with or without the Johnsons and so on because it's impossible to count them all without surviving, not a melody that stands out from the others, not a leap into the void, not an edge ready to wound - all of this is the artistic representation of the inability to reinvent oneself.

And nothing changes in "X & Y," the latest showcase from Coldplay, but it might as well be "Parachutes," or "A Rush of Blood...," as the raw material is always the same. Here, it even starts like "Clocks" remade by Dire Straits (the opening of "Square One"), but it's a scare that soon passes. The lead single, "Speed of Sound," I mistook for "Clocks," and it truly resembles it, and even when they try to experiment - as in "Talk" where they borrow a riff from Kraftwerk's "Computer Love" - the result is amazing: it sounds exactly like "Clocks," in a stadium version.
The rest is ordinary administration, but if you open the newspaper, they are really good, they write Dylan-style, sometimes Beatles-style, yesterday it said Coldplay-style, and evidently, I've missed something.

I'm sure that in a few days everything will be different and I'll look at these songs from a better perspective, but today nothing consoles me and I just hope another '77 arrives as soon as possible and a herd of filthy, dirty punk sweeps away all these nice guys and these nice three-and-a-half-minute-sometimes-four songs.
Or maybe it's just this rain that never stops, falling on the roof of my house (?) where simultaneously you can hear Turkish dances and polka, tango, and Andean chants, from 400 rooms that I don't even remember, to remind each of us where we come from, and the truth is that nothing consoles us, and they expect me to retort with Mario Merola, or maybe start playing the mandolin, and instead, I play "Clocks" remade ad libitum, light a cigarette, find a comfortable position, and start waiting for '77 again.