ApproximatelyInfinite

Nevermind, I got the rules to show up for me :D. Here they are in case anyone else is having trouble viewing them:

YOU CAN ENTER ONCE A DAY?! For some reason, when I click the link to read more of the fine print, it doesn't take me anywhere. Could anyone copy and paste all the rules here under a spoiler? I'm a pretty down-to-earth, realistic person, but I'm totally fangirling at the mere thought of this :lol:. Mostly for the MX listening session, actually...even though the winners will be contractually obligated not to be able to talk/write a word about it like all of us were for "Christmas Lights"...for selfish reasons the mere idea is making me all wiggly :wacky:. I've already met the band (but briefly :P), so that's all well and good too, but it's really the MX listening and opportunity to have an all-expenses-paid Coldplay adventure to a part of the world I've never been to before :dance:

Exactly to both of these posts. Coldplay and this forum are what taught me to be more open-minded about music, and since joining 5 years ago, I feel like I've become a much, MUCH more open-minded person about music. I just...don't even know what they're doing anymore, sometimes. I still like almost everything I've heard to some degree, but for reasons that have NOTHING to do with why I liked Coldplay to begin with. Chris sounds like an alien, for God's sake :uhoh:

Thanks, Tash! Taking it off https worked for me :nice:

Oh...GOD :uhoh: I know it's just a backing track and I'm not going to make a final call on the song without hearing the full version...but oh MAN, that's exactly what I didn't want. I hoped that MM was the extent of their messing with vocal effects. I'm not blanket against vocal effects (two of my favorite albums of all time have them on every single song), but I hate when they're thrown in just to be "cool" or "different." I think rarely are vocal effects employed so they constructively add to the song, and...I don't know what I think the odds are of them working in that way here, as I don't think they worked for them on MM. GOD, I hope HLH doesn't get ruined like the studio version of MM did, because HLH is my favorite of all the new songs :(

^Is anyone else unable to see the page on the Bowers & Wilkinson FB fan page that allows you to enter the contest, or is it just me? :confused: I'm still unemployed and probably will be til September 16, so hey, I might as well try it :P

Oh my GOD, Thalia, that drawing is the best thing I've seen all day :lol:

Very true :P. I admit that I'm pretty tired of all the speculation about things we can't possibly know about or answer ourselves (tracklisting, meaning of MX, etc), but...what else is there to do in the meantime, I guess? I just prefer to hijack threads and discuss their business/promo decisions because I feel more comfortable with those things vs. creative process things :lol:.

I agree that I'm a bit tired of all the endless speculation, but there's little else to do in the meantime on places like this until more music comes out. I really do think it's a "wait for them to tell us" situation. (And Debs said it wasn't made-up)

^"Under 1 Roof" also appears on Chris's piano--I'd wager that it has to do with the music as opposed to a charitable organization. Because Chris put it on the album announcement, it definitely seems like it has more significance than it just being another bit of lyrics or a song title, but at the same time...I don't know if I think it has anything to do with the name Mylo Xyloto. I think we're really going to have to wait and see on that one...I don't know if it's something that can be found out by research.

I think the long album vs. short album debate has more to do with total running time vs. number of tracks, when it comes down to it. Albums over 45 minutes, no matter how good, just feel long to me. As long as they're still good and consistent, of course that doesn't affect how much I love them (some of my favorites are 50 minutes plus), but when you're listening to them all the way through, it's definitely more of a commitment, and can feel more like a marathon.

I hope mine shows up tomorrow, I'm slightly concerned about it :uhoh:. I've had bad luck in the past ordering one-off magazines...

I like that idea, about the paired-up hidden tracks relating to each other, but to me, at least with the Viva hidden tracks, I didn't see strong connections between the two parts of each track from my perspective. And I love CSC so much I think it deserves to be its own track :P

I'm not a huge fan of hidden tracks, either...I mean, with Viva it was nice because we got to hear more of their work, and the hidden tracks were usually pretty short, so the album didn't feel hugely long, but I'm not really in love with having two different songs jammed together on one track and being forced to separate them. "Reign of Love" is by far my least favorite thing on Viva, but "Lovers In Japan" is one of my favorites, so that's kind of annoying sometimes. I don't really mind one at the end, though, like "Till Kingdom Come" or "Life is For Living," even if I don't see the point in hiding them, especially when there's a huge gap of silence between the "last" track and the hidden ones.

My thoughts: --10-11 track album with hidden tracks like VLV --13-track album --10-11 track album with 2-3 extra songs saved for single B-sides --10-11 track album with 2-3 songs never heard from again I think it really could go any way for them. Long albums can be unwieldily, but I'm sure most of us want to hear as much as we can from them at some point. I'd prefer it to be a shorter album, but with the leftover songs saved for REAL B-sides, rather than just having remixes and radio edits and live versions on the single releases.

My thoughts: --10-11 track album with hidden tracks like VLV --13-track album --10-11 track album with 2-3 extra songs saved for single B-sides --10-11 track album with 2-3 songs never heard from again I think it really could go any way for them. Long albums can be unwieldily, but I'm sure most of us want to hear as much as we can from them at some point. I'd prefer it to be a shorter album, but with the leftover songs saved for REAL B-sides, rather than just having remixes and radio edits and live versions on the single releases.

I bet Billboard probably got an exclusive as the first magazine to write on the new era, but I also bet that they're either about to do or have recently done a similar interview with other big magazines like RS and are gearing up to write a bigger article in the next month or so where the reporter gets to hear the songs just like Billboard did. ...if we're talking about Princess of China, I think it definitely is poor quality. All I can hear is crackly BOOMs the entire song, and from the sound of this review, I really don't think the reporter was in Germany hearing it live, so they're going off the same crap version we have, which really shouldn't be enough to publish a professional opinion on, I don't think. The other songs, fine, as we've heard them clearly as live versions, but I don't think PoC should even be on that list.

I think the scores are pretty fair, especially for Rolling Stone, but Charlie Brown should totally not be the lowest of them all, especially with only 2.5 stars. And to give Princess of China a higher rating even when no one has heard a decent version of it except the people who were present to hear it live? So besides those two, which they're obviously on crack for, I think the rest are pretty good. And the write-up was lacking in any snark :D

DP :angry:

I...wouldn't trust any other retailers yet if you were being serious :thinking:

Random bump: I just looked up the old Viva release dates for another reason, and it turns out that Viva was released in the UK on a Thursday back in 2008: JAPAN: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 UK: Thursday, June 12, 2008 EUROPE: Friday, June 13, 2008 AUS/NZ: Saturday, June 14, 2008 USA: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 So even Coldplay's done that before--I guess the weirdest part isn't the day of the week, it's that the official site's release date doesn't match what online retailers are saying :shrug:

Oh my GOD, I forgot all about WHERE Viva leaked :lol: OK, I'm a freak with dates and things, I'm one of those weird people, but--Viva leaked on June 4, and it was supposed to come out on June 12 in the UK (which was a Thursday, weirdly enough) and June 17 in the US, so really it was only a little over a week before, which is pretty typical for leaks.

My guess is early September to the time when Paradise is released, but I don't really have any reason for saying that, it's just a random guess :P.

Here I am to haunt the thread with oftopicness again! :cheesy: Isn't he beautiful? :bigcry: Pris, Anna, Mich (:heart: to all of you)--you guys are some of my old Coldplaying friends I meant earlier that seem to express the same feelings I feel about all that's going on. It kind of freaks me out that we all seem to feel the same way about it, but at the same time, at least it makes me feel like I'm not crazy and imagining all this stuff. As for my opinions of the songs--MTM I think might be my least favorite of all the new material, or at least it was up until a few days ago, when it started to grow on me. ETIAW, warts and all, is one of them that I enjoy the most (along with Charlie Brown and Hurts Like Heaven). MM (studio) needs to lose the vocal filter ASAP, but is otherwise pretty great. I feel like as someone that was asking for "back to basics" and simplicity, UATW should be one of my absolute favorites, but I think it's second to last for me. I just feel like they've done it before--Til Kingdom Come and Now My Feet Won't Touch The Ground are almost overly similar to me.

Lyrically, in terms of overall songs vs. one-off lines etc (of which there have been many that I love in all eras), I feel like I haven't been bowled over since AROBTTH. Songwriting, hmm. I'd have to think about how to phrase what I want to say, and 3AM is not the time to do that :lol:. I think some of my excitement has been dampened by hearing some of the songs already in some form, but I wonder how my excitement this time around would have compared if we only had ETIAW and maybe Paradise before the actual album leak/release.