My Top 100 Albums: #69 - Coldplay, ‘Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends’
69.
Coldplay, ‘Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends’
Parlophone, 2008
To follow up their commercially-successful X&Y, Chris Martin et al enlisted the considerable producing talents of Brian Eno in order to create something much more ambitious and abstract than anything the band had released before. Eno charged Martin with the unenviable task of creating a tracklist of almost entirely unique songs, each with a different sound and feel from the previous. As a result, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends took the better part of two years to write and record; the product of this meticulous and deliberate approach amounting to by far Coldplay’s finest individual work.
What is most striking about this project is that, despite the idiosyncrasy and potency of its component tracks, there is a remarkable consistency and fluidity throughout, both musically and thematically. Characteristic of this album’s music is its complex but memorable rhythms, anthemic choruses and an almost disguised sweetness to the songwriting. Thanks to Eno, we get a tour through styles, with the indie rock flavour of the likes of Cemeteries of London and the title track, the heavy art pop of Lovers in Japan, the dream pop-influenced 42 and Death and All His Friends, the folk-style Violet Hill, and subtle inspirations from world music evident on Lost! and Strawberry Swing. Lyrically, the album is not groundbreaking but is coherent, and macrocosmic, taking on broad subjects such as war, death, love and pain in order to paint an impressionistic landscape of the human condition; some of the lyrics are so broad that it’s hard to say what the song is even about at all. Far from the conventional, introspective indie ballads of Coldplay’s early career, Viva la Vida is an announcement of Coldplay’s entrance into the world of bombastic art pop and arena rock. Febrile, catchy and often understatedly beautiful, its captivating hooks and seductive rhythms make the music stick in the memory, even almost a decade-and-a-half since its release.
Hidden Highlight: 42
Life in Technicolor
Cemeteries of London
Lost!
42
Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love
Yes
Viva La Vida
Violet Hill
Strawberry Swing
Death And All His Friends