The Wake

Dear Coldplay,

Please stop trying to trick me, this isn’t good music.

The new Coldplay album, titled X and Y, is rooted in pretension and laziness. It seems to me that the group ran out of good ideas and talent, and decided to make up for it by producing until there wasn’t one real guitar riff left. The bizarre, encoded liner notes are just a cover, trying to make up for the lack of real music. The front of the album is video game art of a pill bottle in rainbow colors, and when opened the middle of the liner notes contains a chart of some kind with letters and numbers and more rainbow blocks. I thought that maybe the music would contain some sort of clue into this mind trick that Coldplay presented, but all I got was, “Part of a system, I am …You’re part of the human race All of the stars and the outer space …” It’s hard for me to decipher how much of this album is comprised of socio-political commentary and what is leftover from love letters to Gwyneth Paltrow. My favorite song was “Fix You,” a soft ballad that picks up with a vengeance towards the end. The song is highly sentimental, and I think Coldplay or Capitol Records really knew what they were doing when they got it worked into an episode of The O.C. I may have liked the song so much because I was recalling my deep emotional turmoil as I wondered whether or not Ryan and Marissa would finally make it to prom. The question I am left with is “Was it worth my $15 to discover that Chris Martin is past his prime and should retire to concentrate on raising little Apple?” The answer is probably somewhere in these liner notes, if I could ever figure them out. Fuck you, Coldplay.