my thoughts on coldplay

this week, i missed coldplay at the arena. i have mixed feelings about this, and on the night of the show, i tried not to think about the fact that i wasn't there. what it basically came down to was that i refused to pay $95 to see coldplay knowing i wasn't going to be within 50 feet of the stage. since i've seen this band perform numerous times and have met them on multiple occasions, i thought my money would be better spent on seeing 4 - 5 other new bands at 20 bucks a pop.

this decision, however, didn't take away the pain of knowing coldplay was only 5 miles away from me, and i wasn't there!

admittedly, i didn't like coldplay right away. i thought "yellow" (the song that made them famous) wasn't really that great and found it mildly annoying. so i never bought the album. andrea was a huge fan and had an extra ticket to their show in san francisco (summer of 2001, i think?). so i listened to the album the night before the show, thought it was OK, but nothing earth shattering. i saw them live, listened to "parachutes" again, and it started to grow on me...

as much as i love coldplay, i am let down. their 3rd album, X & Y, was utterly disappointing. weak lyrics, melodies and sounds borrowed from other artists, and horrendous song arrangement made this album fall very VERY short of what i had expected. i remember rushing to buy when it was released and as track one was ending, i thought "GOD, this is going to be good." but when i found myself skipping through "fix you" and "what if?" and hating how the album ended, my opinion changed. what happened to the sweet and somber melodies of "parachutes" or the edgy and thoughtful riffs of "a rush of blood to the head"? it's not that i hate this album - i can appreciate some of the songs. i suppose a band can't make a great album every time, and maybe it was wrong of me to expect that.

what i found utterly embarrassing about the whole thing was the enormous effort that went into promoting this album. previews claiming that this would be "coldplay's best album yet" and comparisons to U2 were serious missteps, in my opinion. has the general public come to expect less and less of music these days? i guess with all the britneys, jessicas, and avril lavigne's, maybe.

for coldplay to recover from this, they need to stop trying to make music that everyone will like. when you try to please everyone, something really really important is lost. so i will hope that this album will just be a fluke, and that the boys will get their creative juices flowing again for album 4, whenever that may be.