Friday Pragmatism | Coldplay – Viva la Vida
Full album title Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.
In 2008 the world was afire with Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. I have never been into Coldplay in any measure and swept the buzz to the side having little enthusiasm for them. I’d always said of Coldplay that if I weren’t so into U2 and been brought up on their entire back-catalogue including what I consider to be the pinnacle of their music from Achtung Baby through Zooropa and including Pop, that I probably would get into Coldplay. After-all, it’s not bad music, it’s just generally not good enough.
About a year or so ago Chibi-R got into Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends – well, that or when Prospekt’s March was launched because that’s the edition that he bought. I was pleasantly surprised by the sound and really took to it. Given his enthusiasm, he shared with me a rough, quick play-through of the album and EP and indeed it was impressive, but I still didn’t pay too much attention to it, having the same perspective mentioned above regarding U2.
Recently during a build in what has become this Summer of Gunpla, he let the full album play on some middling PC speakers and sub that I have set up just as a portable set of outputs for our mp3 players, and I was more impressed than I had been in the past.
One fact had escaped me until that day – Rok had probably told me about it but I failed to retain or make use of the information until that full, uninterrupted listen-through; Viva la Vida was produced by Brian Eno.
I don’t want to take anything away from the relative talents of Coldplay, but this album has a great big giant “Brian Eno” stamp over it. Perhaps the album would have been good enough without him, but I certainly wouldn’t have gotten into it and subsequently purchased it a few weeks ago. Eno’s production makes all the difference. There are soaring textures that blend in his massive reverbs in a way that only he can create, a sound I’ve not heard since the Achtung-Zoo-Pop era of U2. It’s a sound that most artists are not willing to try and ape because most of the time it simply falls short. I notice The Killers and Kings of Leon ad nauseum have tentatively approached this sound but it’s nowhere near good enough. There simply is no other man like Brian Eno.
The production on Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends is flawless and beautiful – surprising then that he produced U2’s No Line on the Horizon which I absolutely hated. Something tells me that U2 has become Bono’s cash-cow and the other three guys just enjoy coming along for the ride. It’s not really surprising that my passion for U2’s newer material has been waning ever since All that you can’t leave behind which was a nice, happy album, but far from the glories of Pop and its two other predecessors. All that you can’t leave behind still clung to some great production values, nice expansive reverbs and some awesome mixing and engineering, but I didn’t mind the lighter and more optimistic sound as it worked well, sounded great and most importantly felt emotionally engaging. I don’t mind that I didn’t like Atomic Bomb and No Line, a band is under no obligation to make me happy, it’s great that they’re doing whatever they want and so they should – I don’t have to get into Get on your boots (good god Bono!) if I feel like it and that’s fine. I will always have Achtung Baby, Zooropa, Zoo TV live, Pop and Popmart live for my all-time favourite U2 tunes and they should continue to do whatever they want.
It is surprising though that Eno produced No Line and yet I didn’t connect with it. Perhaps there’s much more Bono in the music these days – or perhaps there always was, it’s just that as he changes as people do and should, he moves towards ways of expressing himself that I don’t connect with.
Coldplay is becoming more of a different beast to U2 than I had given them credit for. There has always been so much in their sound that reminded me of U2, but as I take particular note of the lyrics, melodies and musical themes, they indeed have their own sound. So great is this different sound, and yet so closely are the similarities to U2 sometimes, that I believe that Viva la Vida is the spiritual successor to the U2 sound that died after 1997’s album Pop. Since then I’ve not had any music with quite the same grand and graceful production, intelligence in engineering and pure and sublime sound-scapes. Some has come close, but nothing that has really blown away my sound-engineer’s ear at the same time as engaging me emotionally. Discussing it with my brother who also took to Viva la Vida and not their older stuff, he suggested that the way Coldplay were in their early days was very different to the way U2 started out in Ireland all those years ago, and that until now, perhaps Coldplay just haven’t really had the right level of passion to really say and do something more than just record a pop-album. I can certainly appreciate this idea and would more-or-less agree, knowing very little of Coldplay’s origins myself. Regardless; the sound on Viva la Vida is without question exceptional. It reaches into the lofty heights of Achtung Baby – unfortunately without being its equal, but coming a sight closer than all other music, something that is rare indeed.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I do rather like getting into things months, often years after they were popular. I like to let things lie, see how time treats things and see whether the works are enduring. I like most if not hopefully all of my music to be timeless – I know that’s a point of great subjectivity as nostalgia is always worth something, but nonetheless, the way I perceive things, the better something is, the more enduring its value and more than that, the more its value increases and evolves given new experiences over time. After all the buzz over Viva la Vida has died down and no-one is talking about it any more, I find the right time came to sit down and have a listen to it on some good speakers and cans, and really soak myself in the sound. It is without question one of the best recordings in over ten years but not only that, like the U2 albums I love, every element comes together to form an exceptional album; the mixing and engineering, musicianship, lyrics and spread of different ideas that come together to form a great album; something of a dying art in a marketplace evolving towards iTunes and piecemeal purchasing.
Well done Coldplay – I look forward to your future releases.