Coldplay – X&Y Review

Even without actively choosing to listen to Coldplay, most of their songs are known through cultural osmosis. Background noise at coffee shops. Advertisements, entertainment, festivals, they all use the melodic tone Chris Martin and the band have provided for over two decades. Coldplay is a band obsessed with space but too scared of being bullied to ever suggest it is their sole interest. Those moments of wonder which open X&Y, the controls set not for the heart of the sun but directing us to everything we could want to know, shines a light on a sincerity which Coldplay has since lost. We could have had a space-age band, a Hawkwind-like pop structure to lead us into the twenty-first century. X&Y is a taste of that, a criminally underrated album in Coldplay’s dreck-filled discography.

Opener Square One, had it been rightly seen as the best part of the album, opens up a whole new side to Coldplay. Much of X&Y has a curious-sounding band questioning the world around them, using their fame and acclaim as a useful tool for gauging the big events. This is exactly what Martin had promised with Parachutes. Coldplay has, at their best, always sounded like an amalgamation of other pop artists. Here, they channel the guitar strength of Achtung Baby U2 and light lyrical assessments Oasis had been making in their heyday. Coldplay is, as they had been on Parachutes, a mirror to their influences. They are not pushing through with some amazing or refreshing sound, but adapting to what the bands they listened to were doing. Adapting those tones into a more conventional style is no easy task, though it does limit the range Coldplay can offer their listeners. It always has, but there is safety in hearing new renditions of what you already know.  

X&Y offers that, but like Parachutes, comes through as a thoroughly likeable piece of work. Sincerity is hard to find in pop music, especially around the mid-2000s. But here is an abundance from Coldplay, a band whose most recent efforts are devoid of this emotional range. White Shadows is a wonderful song, overshadowed by the more obvious heartbreak and emotive punch of Fix You. Both are excellent in their own way, and they push Martin and the band to their limit. It may be a short walk to their limit, but it is a push for more, irrespective of the result. Coldplay continually tries to bend their influences into new shapes, and X&Y certainly does this. They may get a deservedly bad rap now, but their earlier works, when the band were still intensely searching for new meaning in old sources, offer such an easy-going sincerity.  

A title track deserving of a spot in the live shows, and a series of opportunities to connect with the band in their Y side, is what is on offer here. Relatively light love songs are what the band concerns itself with in the latter half of X&Y. They work nicely, backed by convincing musicianship Coldplay would soon distance themselves from. Martin and the band are popularity pursuers. They will echo the call of whatever happens to be popular at the time. It works wonders around this time when heartfelt sincerity was the core of chart-topping releases. How far they have fallen since X&Y. Even their most obvious interests have the meaning removed. X&Y is a tremendous piece of work from the band, a major difference to those space-oriented efforts of the modern day.