I suppose we’ve all written them off by now… Not unpleasant hit pop songs. Yeah. And most of you hated them from the start, and okay, but guess what?.. Parachutes and Rush of Blood were pretty fucking good. I know that cos I’m listening to Parachutes right now and it’s pretty fucking good. And Rush of Blood is better, which is better than pretty fucking good. QED.
But give it a go: my assessment is spot on… or spot off. DiScuss.
Nope
I still like Parachutes. It’s a perfectly pleasant album.
Everything else, no.
I like every single one of their albums.
There’s a couple of songs I don’t like on A Head Full of Dreams, and X&Y has that mid noughties over reliance on Pro-Tools sound, but on the whole I love them quite a bit.
Viva La Vida is their best album. The first four are all pretty good, after that it drops off a cliff somewhat. Chris Martin gets a lot of stick just for being a bit over-earnest, not sure why really.
Parachutes was good, it’s certainly stood the test of time better than a lot of other white indie guitar led debuts.
A Rush of Blood was excellent, and it’s only ubiquity that’s soured it.
By X & Y they’d gone formula, and stuff like Fix You was blatantly courting lighter waving glasto audiences.
Viva wotnot had some great tracks (including the shoegazey hidden one) but was difficult to stomach in one dose, but let’s face it, one Paltrow came into the equation, no one was going to admit they liked them.
Mylo Xyloto had one good song (Charlie Brown), but hey, Paltrow.
Ghost Stories was just a retread of the quiet bits of Parachutes (so bits of it were quite good), but hey, Paltrow.
I’m not even going to start to defend a Head Full of Dreams (because I haven’t listened to it).
Soft target for try hards if you ask me.
I reckon Coldplay have about five songs I actively like, which immediately puts them in about the top 0.5% of bands that exist.
Cause he’s obviously an absolutely heaving cunner
Parachutes always gets brought up as being the actually good one when it’s just better than the other massive selling albums of that time, and being better than ‘white ladder’ isn’t that much of a hallmark of quality
Really?
Parachutes isn’t very good really, it’s a bit amateurish. Rush of Blood to the Head is their best one, The Scientist is probably their best song, although I like Amsterdam on that album too
X&Y is a pile of shit and as a consequence is the last Coldplay album I made the effort to listen to
There are some good tracks off X&Y, namely 1,3,5,7. In fact chiefly I remember listening to that album in frustration because the rest of the album was just full of utter shitshows liked Fix You.
Anyway, Parachutes is pretty much full-beige after the opening four tracks. Dunno about Rush of Blood - never heard the album and all those singles got played so much it’s difficult to have any opinion on them beyond “oh”.
The single they had a few years back that @xylo misheard as ‘Parrot Mice’ was okay.
So, in conclusion, they mostly fail to impress me but they have some good tracks. Worth just putting those four X&Y tracks on. Maybe.
I think Viva La Vida is probably their best (maybe because of Brian Eno) and looking back a lot of their big early hits like Yellow, In My Place, God Put A Smile and The Scientist all have the same chorus.
Summary of their career:
First three albums: boring as fuck
Viva la Vida: 2 or 3 decent songs
Subsequent albums: utter shite
Viva La Vida > Mylo Xyloto > A Rush of Blood To The Head > Parachutes > Ghost Stories > X&Y > A Head Full of Dreams
The only two I have any time for is Parachutes and Rush of Blood to the Head. The rest can get in the sea
I think we’ve had this thread a few times…probably because most mid 20s/30s Indie Rock fans (DiSsers) were in their teens for Coldplay’s heyday.
fwiw, I think you could compile a decent album of all their best songs, but nothing more.
Went from being shit wet flannel pap to somehow ever shitter reinterpreted eurodance midlife crisis rubbish. Wafer thin instrumentation, reductive, boring, over produced awful band of shitcunts.
And yer man can’t sing for toffee - which is very apparent live.
I’ll go so far as to say they draw a bit more ire than they should, mostly due to their sheer omnipresence in the early 00s… but fuck me is this a really fucking boring band to try to lionize.
I think my main problem with them isn’t their music, just more what they represent - ie the total stagnation of popular culture.
In 2001 they won the Brit Award for best group. In 2016 they won the Brit Award for best group. 15 years apart. Can you imagine the same band having won in 1981 and 1996? It’s inconceivable. (Also, Ant and Dec hosted the Brits in both 2001 and 2016. And Coldplay headline Glastonbury every bloody year as well)
I just wish something would come along and make them irrelevant, it ought to have happened by now.