Thanks to Brian Eno, Antonia Simigis of Playboy.com thinks maybe the popular band might be, uh, okay:
Pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman declared that "Coldplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band I've ever heard in my entire fucking life" in 2004's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. New York Times music critic Jon Pareles seconded that emotion in his classic 2005 piece "The Case Against Coldplay," deeming the Brits "the most insufferable band of the decade." (The fact that the group took out a full-page ad for its album X & Y in the paper that day is still delicious irony.) The Coldplay backlash -- something I've always enthusiastically supported -- is nothing new, but the fact that I'm still forced to hear Chris Martin's grating Thom Yorke-wannabe falsetto on "Clocks" while grocery shopping is a regular twist-the-knife reminder of how much I hate this band.
So in anticipation of Coldplay's latest North American invasion (tickets go on sale for select dates this weekend), I decided to commit a bit of masochism and listen to "Violet Hill," the first single off the band's lengthily-titled forthcoming disc, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends (which you can hear at Coldplay.com.)
And it...wasn't horrible. Thank producer Brian Eno (musician/ collaborator extraordinaire who has turned plenty of coin sculpting the sounds of Devo, Talking Heads and U2), who thankfully convinced Martin to drop his voice an octave, while getting the band to explore an unexpectedly distorted, feverish, almost Oasis-like sound. Granted, Eno is a genius (in addition to essentially inventing ambient music, he also earned a cool mil from Microsoft for writing the Windows 95 startup sound), but who knew he was a miracle worker?
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Comments on this entry:
I've got a couple Oblique Strategies for Chris Martin to try out, most of which involve loaded firearms and/or toxic household chemicals.