KEY POINTS:
Last week TimeOut got a sneak preview of Coldplay's new album, Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends - call it Viva for short - before its release on Monday.
There's been much talk about it being Coldplay's Kid A, but never fear, it's still Coldplay and a minor revolution rather than a bloody one.
These days they are more like a brand than a band, making the album one of the year's biggest releases. An example of the power Chris Martin and co wield in the music business lies in the fact that the performance of Viva is essential to the wellbeing of their record company, EMI.
Here's some first impressions of what Viva sounds like to TimeOut and what the band have to say about it ...
Life In Technicolour
Wow. This two-minute, mostly instrumental intro, with Chris Martin's distinct, half-pained wail only adding "oh oh ohs" near the end, is so revolutionary. Actually, it's not at all and Martin agrees, labelling the riff "a good ringtone". However, what this Where The Streets Have No Name-style build-up reveals, is that the London lads do have an adventurous side and it signals their intention to do something different on album four rather than wheeling out the plodding, yet inviting and much-loved anthems of old.
"I didn't want to sing for a few minutes just so that people who didn't like us could enjoy it for a while," says Martin. "It comes out of insecurity but also confidence. It's that great dichotomy that we're very good at, which is feeling like we're the best band in the world but also feeling that we haven't done anything good yet."
Cemeteries
Of LondonHere they delve into the underbelly of their hometown, as if influenced by Damon Albarn's musical project The Good, the Bad, and the Queen, who also lurched and prowled the dark lanes of Londontown on their self-titled album last year.
There's a flamenco, hand-clap groove running through it too, as if Martin and the chaps have been down the front, leaping around at Womad. It's still Coldplay but without the predictable structure, something the band say ambient music king and Viva producer Brian Eno (Talking Heads, U2) encouraged them to do by using everything from hypnotism to recording in churches in Barcelona.
"He brought life, freedom, drive, distortion, excitement, oddness, madness, sexuality, geekiness and Roxyness," says Martin.
Lost!
Lost! has a loping, unflinching beat with a heavy, organ-driven funereal mood. It stands out as the most beautiful moment on Viva. Although it's let down by Martin's frightful cliches like "big fish in a little pond" and "every river that you try to cross".
For him, it's the key song on the album: "There's always a song on our albums which is the cornerstone around which everything else gets written and without that [one] we wouldn't have got all the others. We wrote it in a sound-check after we listened to that Blur song, Sing."
Notice the Albarn influence again.
42
Every band has to write their Bohemian Rhapsody at some stage, and 11 years after Radiohead did theirs with Paranoid Android, Coldplay borrow a few riffs from that tune for the middle section of this three-stage epic.
"We'd been trying for about two years to record a song that didn't have any choruses, that didn't really have any verses, was just, you know, one section and another section and into a different section," says guitarist Jonny Buckland.
The first part is a serenade, during which Martin comes up with the album's most magical vocal line with, "Those who are dead are not dead they're just living in my head"; the mid-section has Paranoid Android weirdness and heaviness; and the final part ups the tempo, like conventional Coldplay hammering away doing a version of the Strokes' Barely Legal.
However, it has to be said, 42 is not long enough to be a true Bohemian Rhapsody.
Lovers In Japan/Reign Of Love
A dual titled song? Have Coldplay gone crazy? The first half has a brisk and uplifting tranquility to it with the piano part reminiscent of a harpsichord.
It's the sort of song Chris and Gwyneth might play if you were at their place for Sunday lunch.
Meanwhile, Reign Of Love is like a majestic hymn. "The original went on for 20 minutes," says guitarist Jonny Buckland.
"We cut it down a fair bit. I'm not sure anyone else would have been quite as into it as we were for 20 minutes but it's quite a fresh-sounding song.""
Yes
At seven minutes long, Yes continues Coldplay's new-found jamming mentality and, with Martin's deep, morose vocals; woozy, discordant strings; and bursts of fiddle-playing freak-outs, it's the strangest song on the album. It's more of a candidate for Coldplay's Bohemian Rhapsody than 42, that's for sure.
The last, and most trippy part of the song is called Chinese Sleep Chant (yes, it's official. Coldplay have gone completely crazy by including an unlisted track on their new album). Not surprisingly, this My Bloody Valentine-meets-U2 moment is producer Eno's favourite song.
And even though it sounds like a girl, it is Martin singing, according to drummer Will Champion.
"Chris has a very recognisable voice but the treatment of it on our records has always been fairly similar and the idea of having some different, slightly more characterful treatments of his voice was something that we really wanted to do."
Viva La Vida
If Life In Technicolour is the ringtone, then Viva La Vida is the ad jingle. Apple could very well have commissioned the song for the iTunes ad it is the soundtrack to. It certainly sounds the closest to the anthemic Coldplay of old. But don't tell the band because they think it's revolutionary and not just because of the song title.
Champion: "We're always talking about these brave decisions that we wanted to make and not wanting to sound like old Coldplay and we thought the best way to make [Viva La Vida] stand out would be to just strip it back from all the instrumentation ... it's just got a bass drum and a bell and there's not much else to it."
Violet Hill
On the first single off the album, the raunchy riffs and mid-song Pink Floyd-ish guitar solo sound a little try-hard and out-of- place.
Martin reckons it's Buckland's guitar hero song. "It's very much a Jonny fest and it's like a good air guitar song. It's a good indicator of our new mentality [and] a good indicator that we're moving into different areas."
You have to give it to them though, it was a ballsy move for a band formerly known as bedwetters to release this song first because, as Champion points out, "it has more depth and more colour to it than we had before".
Strawberry Swing
Apart from the title, what gives this song a lighter and more inspiring feel than anything else on the album is the festive Celtic mood, a tribal groove akin to Malian desert blues band, Tinariwen, and Martin's recurring line "it's such a perfect day".
"It's very warm," says Martin, "and when all the noise about how much we've changed or how much we're experimenting, is over in about three months, then it'll just be left with which songs people are going to like and I think Strawberry Swing will be a lot of people's favourite song."
Death And All His Friends
Martin is back to his hushed, and whispery best at the start of this song, accompanied by a piano and fragile guitar. Two minutes in it picks up to a rousing romp and then, with what sounds like the cheeping of birds, it gives way to the film score-cum-hymn of hidden track The Escapist, which loops back to the beginning of the album.
