MX

 

The album is lush and brilliant but also teeming with fear, self-pity and egoistic nihilism. It expands and contracts; it is associative while also diffuse; it breathes like life. It instructs in the way of self-love by imagining a romance that whethers the implacable impression of a surveilling, domineering, and not necessarily exterior force having mastery over our actions. The beguiling violence of self-hatred is ultimately subsumed into a timid but unspeakably true  expression of self- and so is the world annihilated in a self-less oblivion. 

 

 The band  understands the ironic prevalence of symbolism in the post-symbolic world, the effeteness of culture where truth is admitted as pretext, and the only verifiable foundations of reality: impermanence and structure. This is the world we have made for ourselves, the band says. These walls are our walls; these hatreds are our hatreds; and these flaws are our flaws. In everything small is the imprint of everything big, and everything big is likewise the product of everything small- in time as well as space. Why this is the case must owe itself to the qualities of circulars and the nature of Euclidean triangulation, but that's not worth getting into. And anyways, there is an extent to which 'why' is a compensation for defeat of ego. 

 

Listen to the way they highlight 'para-' in paradise: a nonexistent, illusory figment of want more than a real destination. Notice the incongruous isolation of the character in ETIAW; the feelings of both internal and external paranoia in Major Minus, manifest in the in-collapsibility of polar opposites; the quiet violence of Up in Flames;  the sonic backdrop of DLBYH; and, the incontestable satisfaction of expectation in Up With the Birds. 

 

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h38srxvt6qE&feature=youtube_gdata_player]Lucy Analyzes Charlie Brown - YouTube[/ame]

 

Reactions need to stop reaching for the one-to-one allegory and get comfortable with the metaphorical metaphor. The cd is about Analytical reductionism set against the post-modern basics: oppressive and depressive symbolism; circles; resisting the vacuity of classicism and pure logic; and the deconstruction of masculinity from an inductive and material actor to a passive participant in what French Historians have termed the double helix of sexuality. 

Is this all absolutely evidenced within the record? No. And neither is there anything explicit to indicate that the record is anything other than intrinsic genius disassociated from external artistic stimulate. But we know from experience that the world is not like this. We know that our selves and self-images are less dependent upon our own efforts at protecting them and more visibly precarious than the tomnage of civilization has hitherto indicated. We know that our actions might reveal some superficial effort, but that they may also be hindered- in the ever-larger picture- by some self-imposed limitation. Regarding the video, we do not know that Lucy ever intended to take the ball away. Charlie's emotional failure is his emotional clairvoyance: he plants the seeds of his own mistakes because he knows on a deeper level that everything has already been experienced as pain. In reality it's people like Charlie who grow up to be geniuses. They seem to have their fingers fixed on the tremulous pulse of civilization however layered a structure it becomes. 

When I imagine these songs I see different analytical viewpoints wedded by tenuous homages to the widened gyre. I see male and female, and not the fetid stereotypes with which we are often bombarded but the true definitions: feminity as something insuperably, spectacularly cosmic but also inherently conflicted about spacial inequities; masculinity as something ineluctably driven towards its goal- though it no doubt loses some of its variety in the process. And this too: that femininity and masculinity are together constitutive of process- duality, polarity, a fomenting, aggressive rubric for knowlEdge and experience not a little like distortive oculars amidst an inconstant and over-used linearity.

The record is brighter and more fervid than those of the past, but it is also ironically smaller. The word schitzhremic has been used, and it is not Inapposite. I would hazard another descriptive label, at the risk of producing the kind of induction I and Coldplay together abhor: the album is epistolary. It does not concern Viva's turbid existentialism or XY's luminiferous metaphysic. rather, this album is illimitably more mature. Each song is in itself another attempt at some demonstration, as was the whole of their previous effort, and in each song is the imprint of something grand and at once grievously inaccessible. 

Listen to the songs, the choruses, the suffixed beginnings that serve to introduce you to the momentary perceptions of dissonance and congruity within the pattern. You are looking through a world distorted by halves in Charlie Brown, but you are also looking AT something- and because the domain of science is not so far removed as we pretentiously suggest, we might say that the band is noting how you can find position but not movement, and movement but not position. This is the central affair of history, no? This is man and woman: man the teleological strain of purpose through time; woman the tonnage of all incollapsible space within the present. Look at the types of songs that characterize the actors in this play. Look at how similar are major minus and CB and how paradise seems to fill a box like voluminous, gaseous want. Notice how the album seems to carry familiar notes and sequences, each requiring the mind to fill the utter void where it expected a note it did not receive. These songs' meanings are not in the lyrics alone: the notes impress in the mind freudian symbols of want, images of protrusions and lacunae. Notice how the last note on the album is the one for which the band has made us passively yearn throughout. this is sophisticated beyond sophisticated. 

Whatever your particular feelings about the album, you must understand as I do that it is as important a work as any that have been made. If we could look thirty years in the future we would see that Mylo Xyloto is appreciated like Sgt. Pepper and Kid A and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and Dark Side of the Moon. It is sexual and unsettling when viewed in the right way.

 You may be scoffing, but it's statistically certain that I'm smarter than you and anyways I could give a shit. Categories are temporary. 

 

 

 

I apologize for that last part, but I feel strongly about the band and I feel I'm right in my assessments (the band needn't be aware of their efforts to render them). I suppose that statement was more preemptive defense mechanism than desire to harm you, reader. But what isn't? I have never wished you harm, on the Internet where I can get away with it or otherwise. Your pain at my insult is my pain as well; the world is felt everywhere and at once through mimicry.

It's worth noting that I think the band's ordering of the songs makes the second half of the album feel incomplete to me. I've put MMIX and ETIAW after UWTB and put MTM after MM. It flows much better and we all know MTM feels right in there somewhere, even if it is mostly Bowie's.

I'd skip ETIAW all together tbh, but I feel the same regarding MTM after MM and how this is Bowie :wacky:

 

Why didn't you post your review among the others in the thread MX reviews by forum members?

 

It’s a nice review. Just some things that I wondered while reading: I miss kinda, the mentioning of George Orwell’s 1984 which is a pity because you seem to recognize a lot of it in MX. I know that Muse ‘s The Resistance is said to be mainly influenced by 1984 and yet I feel that Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto has turned out to contain more 1984 than The Resistance. As you say it breaths ‘panta rhei’ and the problems society cause to date. It’s also about man/woman in the setting of what it's really about. Perhaps no one dares to say it’s 1984 because Coldplay says in interviews the album is inspired by New York graffiti and the White Rose movement, yet they don’t explicitly mention 1984 while Muse did.

One thing about the whole understanding reality thing: aren’t the only verifiable foundations you mentioned a paradox?

And how could mimicry possibly canal feelings anywhere and at once? :S

 

Btw, I’d love to see chuck kottke’s reaction on your MX impressions.

 

And Dear Great Name Bearer :uhoh:, I think we’ve just encountered a statistical fallacy. :P You should know better if you were to be the smartest around here. (this is not me trying to say that I am smarter, it’s merely drawing the attention on a fallacy within the statement which might have slipped your attention)