By Keith Whamond
Smooth, simple, haunting, beautiful, Coldplay’s sophomore effort, A Rush of Blood to the Head.
And with a fair amount to live up to. The band’s last album, Parachutes, sold 1.4 million copies, backed by the hits “Yellow” and “Trouble”. With all four members, Chris Martin (vocals), Jon Buckland (guitar), Guy Berryman (bass) and Will Champion (drums) still in their early 20s, the band is already being compared to The Smiths, Radiohead, and U2.
It’s with A Rush of Blood to the Head that the band really solidifies their place in the world of music. All of the songs bear a resemblance of those on Parachutes, but with the proper growth.
With the first track, “Politik,” Martin asks us to “Look at Earth from outer space,”an invitation to join the band on a trip for the next 54 minutes.
That’s really what this album is, too; a personal invitation from four British lads to listen to their music. You can feel the acoustic guitars, the pianos, and the drums as though you were sitting in the room with the band when it was recorded. The strict rhyming style, the mournful vocals totally unique to Martin, this is all distinctively Coldplay.
The first single off the album is “In My Place,”which is probably the most commercial of all the songs on the album.
Memorable and catchy, the song still carries the vibe of the band and their new album. “I was scared/tried, and under prepared/but I wait for you,” Martin sings. A bad love life for him means excellent songs for us.
The same beautiful piano playing heard on “Trouble” returns on “Amsterdam,” the album’s closing track, one of the best on the album. “My star is fading/And I see no chance of release/And I know I’m dead on the surface/But I am screaming underneath,” says Martin.
How anyone could pen a work like this and consider himself fading is beyond most mere mortals. “It’s weird how that song got on,” Martin told Billboard magazine, “because it never really had that much attention paid to it. That was probably the song that took us the longest time to write, although it’s actually the simplest song.”
One of the best albums of 2002. Buy it.
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