Coldplay: A Rush of Blood to the Head

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Coldplay's album-of-the-year debut of two years ago, Parachutes, was always going to be an easy act to follow.

How hard could it be?

Just keep the music simple and deceptively direct like it was last time and whip up another set of sensitive, plaintive tunes we can all sway along to, even if we can't hit the high notes in the singalong bits quite like Chris Martin - the latest pin-up for English guy angst in the gallery alongside Richard Ashcroft and Thom Yorke.

No, best save any art statements until that difficult third or fourth album, by which time they'll selling out stadiums anyway.

Yes, while the first impression of this is that Coldplay are merely keeping up the good work, the concise 11-song collection soon starts feeling like a wider, deeper, darker affair.

In places it's as soppy and beautiful as those gorgeous melancholy bits on Parachutes, but it's also musically more considered - Martin is at the piano keyboard almost as much as he is behind his acoustic guitar.

Lyrically, while it has songs of hopeless devotion affecting enough to fall in love to (as on gentle U2-ish ballad The Scientist), it's also got the weight of the world on some tracks.

Perhaps it's because poor Martin has more brow to furrow than he did last time, but elsewhere there's a fair bit of mortality being contemplated, powers-that-be to be railed against, and big questions to be pondered.

Fortunately, when Coldplay do it, it's done with heart, intelligence, occasional wit and restrained style.

That's right from the start when Politik, after pounding its beginning, leaves Martin alone at the ivories contemplating the state of the world: "Look at Earth from outer space. Everyone must find their place."

Among the best of these philosophical numbers is the late-arriving title track, a song memorable from its live performance at their St James show a year ago. Though what sounded like a Nick Cave-ish grim musing first time out, is here a fully fledged epic that manages to out-Bono Bono ("I'm going to buy a gun and start a war, if you can tell me something worth fighting for") in its verses before hitting its stratospheric choruses.

The other vintage rock comparison, which didn't occur last time around, was that of Echo and the Bunnymen. Martin's voice and Johnny Buckland's guitar can make Daylight, especially, sound like those purveyors of 80s cosmic rock anthems, while the churning Warning Sign also reminds of the Bunnymen's fellow Liverpudlian Julian Cope.

And yes, they can often sound like our own Greg Johnson, and the flurry of arpeggiated piano of Clocks might have some trawling the Chills' back catalogue.

It does hit some tepid patches along the way - for some reason the languid Warning Sign brought on memories of a local television jingle for a bank (the one with the "You're a New Zealander" voiceover). But that's the risk of relying on so many of those good old chords.

And to finish, Amsterdam, on which the band's dynamic ability - okay, how they move so sweetly from a whisper to a grand rock swagger- gets its biggest fireworks-assisted blast.

It's a throat-lumpening finish to an album that may not catch the ear quite the way Parachutes did. But A Rush of Blood to the Head still has a very big brain and one deep pulse.

Label: Parlophone