It’s painful to talk about, but my lengthy musical relationship with Chris Martin and Coldplay has, over the years, gotten fairly sour. They make great pop, no question about it, but the sheer magnitude of their celebrity created a weird rift between us in the time between Parachutes and the tail-end of the Rush of Blood singles. It’s regretful, but it was this self-same rift which prevented me from truly enjoying Rush of Blood (apart from the erudite "Clocks" of course), at a time when everyone and their cousin were queueing up to bear Chris Martin’s twitchy, paparazzi-beating Brit children.
In any case, it’s been 5 years since Parachutes and I think it may be time to finally put the whole issue to rest. X & Y* is a wonderful, wonderful album, and is their most consistent release to date. Crowd-pleasers like Rush of Blood’s "In My Place" have taken a backseat to more mature tracks like "The Hardest Part", "A Message" and "What If" (which you can download right here). The extended version of "Talk" is another standout. (It feels a bit wrong to call it one of the album’s strongest tracks because of the fact that its main riff is lifted from a Kraftwerk original, but it’s definitely one of the better songs they’ve released.)
*There’s a weird snippet over at Coldplay.com regarding that album title (and the bausdots cover), which I will dutifully copy and paste here:
"In mathematics, X and Y were always the answers, but in life, no one knows," Chris says. "To me the album is about those unanswerable questions, and what you should do about the fact that you can’t explain all the unknown variables."
Actually Chris, in mathematics, X and Y aren’t the answers, they’re the questions. But yeah, we get where you’re coming from.