By JARED PURCELL
You/Local Editor
REVIEW
With the release of their fourth full-length album entitled “Viva La Vida” or “Death and All His Friends,” Coldplay has pushed their sound to a new level of exoticness.
From beginning to end, the album flows as well as a movie soundtrack. The listener will find that each track has its own character, filling the album with villains and heroes. It is the prince and the pauper all in one. All for one and one for all.
Basically, it’s Coldplay; at their best.
The first track, “Life in Technicolor,” manages to kick off the album in a provocative way by being purely instrumental without voice additions from lead-singer Chris Martin.
The main theme of this first track is also repeated in the final movement of the last song of the album, “Death and All His Friends,” taking the album full-circle and wrapping it up in a fitting manner.
The album evokes a sense of mystery with the haunting, Celtic-like tones of the track “Cemeteries of London” and also possesses some docile folk sounds in the song “Strawberry Swing.”
Martin and his bandmates also seemed to have channeled the musicality of Peter Gabriel for the song “Lost!,” which has a slightly new style of Coldplay that old fans will still enjoy.
Perhaps the most experimental track on the album is “42.” While starting off like something out of an Earth, Wind and Fire ballad, the song changes pace into an urgent, perplexing rhythm that somehow manages to straddle the line between enjoyable and unusual.
Like Queen’s “We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions,” the track “Lover’s in Japan/Reign of Love” is actually two songs in one, but they are meant to be together. “Lover’s in Japan” is the most triumphant sounding song on the album and “Reign of Love” is the most soothing, with a light-hearted piano part that sounds like something out of the “Beautiful Mind” soundtrack.
While the “Viva La Vida” and “Violet Hill” tracks have already hit the airwaves, each song on this album is arguably radio worthy because each song represents a different character in a journey that is the entirety of “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.”
