Here's why you have to cut Coldplay some slack. First of all, Gwenyth Paltrow appears to be as completely awful as everyone says she is, but what made her that way seems to have been marrying Chris Martin. So HOW COULD HE HAVE KNOWN? It's bad enough to have your beautiful new wife suddenly turn into a horrific and public douche, but to have it happen because she's been hanging around with you, that's a double whammy. Second, for all his lyrical failings, Chris Martin writes the most gorgeously pure melodies of anyone we've got right now. He has a talent for locking into a chord progression, never fighting it or trying to find the most clever way to tart it up. (I'm looking at you Dirty Projectors) Instead he is always searching for that perfectly correct melody—the one that makes it hard to imagine anything else in it's place. Which isn't to say that these are painfully obvious tunes. When he isn't soothing us with just the right note, Martin will take that gently surprising melodic turn. Not so much striking out in a new direction, but taking the scenic route to the place you already knew you were going.
Monday, September 21, 2009
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Is this the one they stole from Kraftwerk, or the one they stole from Joe Satriani? I keed, I keed. Sort of. In response, I appropriated the "I'm looking at you" meme for one of my reviews accidentally. I'd never read this review before I wrote that, I just appropriated it out of the general human subconscious. George Harrison did the same thing all the time.
ReplyDeleteColdplay bugs me because there's nothing to be bugged about, except that it all does sound like you've heard it before somewhere. Like you say, you can't imagine things being different in this song. I'd venture to say that that's the problem: obviousness.
No one bothered to imagine these ideas being any different than they've always been. A pinch of this, a smidge of that and poof! No re-contextualization or re-conceptualization, but a layered regurgitation.
Don't get me wrong, I like eating 7-layer dip at parties, but it's kind of bland.