Cleggy

At first I had considered not listening to them and waiting for the album. But frankly after the recent material I need to know if it's actually worth getting the new album. I have a feeling Up In Flames won't be as good as R42 makes it out to be. R42 said Paradise was awesome and that ETIAW was the new Clocks/Viva so he's certainly not the most reliable of sources.

They're both shit but Paradise is a better shit than ETIAW.

You know, when I first heard Christmas Lights I was absolutely blown away. I was convinced that if they continued to write songs as good as that then their upcoming album would be amazing beyond words. It made me feel really happy around Christmas, I had another year to look forward to and the prospect of an astonishing new Coldplay album. But now I've heard bits of it I feel cheated. There's certainly some good moments like the guitar riff from Charlie Brown and Hurts Like Heaven as a whole but there's nothing that gives me goosebumps like A Rush of Blood to the Head and Parachutes did. There's nothing there that inspires me to do anything other than rant about how bad Coldplay have become. I even loved most of Viva. Death And All His Friends was a great ending to the album and it gave me hope that the next album would continue where it left off at the end of Viva. But I feel really disheartened with all the new stuff. It's seems like they've been working on it for an age. And what do we get at the end of it? A few pop songs that could have been written by anybody is half an hour.

Wow, that almost brought me to tears. You're completely right. It's a sad situation right now. :(

The first thing I'm going to do with the album is import it into Audacity, completely remove ETIAW and then edit Paradise so only the start and the end are left. Then I'll get rid of all the other pop bullshit parts from the other songs. I could be left with about 2 minutes of music when I'm done.

The first 40 seconds or so and the outro are fantastic.

Hahah I don't think so. The last 4 tracks on The King of Limbs are actually really good. I would agree that Paradise is better than the first 4 tracks on The King of Limbs but really that's not saying much at all.

Sadly, this is true. If Paradise was by an indie artist, it wouldn't even break the top 100.

I've come to accept that Coldplay are never going to write anything as good The Scientist again, which makes these below-par lyrics slightly more tolerable.

I think it's the way forward for Coldplay. When Radiohead's material started going downhill with Hail to the Thief (although that's still quite a good album) they left their label, did solo stuff for a while and then came back and did the best thing they've done for years with In Rainbows. Unfortunately though Coldplay haver just signed a deal with Universal and they like money as much as EMI, so this mainstream thing isn't changing anytime soon. In my opinion they should break up for a while and come back and pull an In Rainbows moment. They should release it like In Rainbows too and come out and say 'by the way we've got a new album'. That would avoid a lot of the disappointment after this big build up that a lot of people are feeling.

It already has 14 tracks. Isn't that enough for you? And please stop throwing Car Kids into everything at every possible opportunity, it's just 2 words. We don't even know if it's a song, and judging by Coldplay's recent material it's probably crap anyway.

Yet another person who doesn't understand that not every Coldplay fan laps up everything the band do like it's golden... Fansite or not, the song isn't very good so we'll criticise it. Simple.

Coldplay plagiarised themselves. Mind = blown. But yeah I actually noticed this, it's a great little melody.

Isn't evolution supposed to make things better? For example, over time humans have evolved to have bigger, better brains so they can function more effectively. Evolution certainly isn't the correct term to describe what we're hearing.

X&Y had better b-sides than album tracks. This time it's almost certainly going to be the same, even if Moving to Mars is the only b-side. I'd rather listen to Moving To Mars for 50 minutes than an album with the likes of Paradise, ETIAW and Rihanna.

Today has been some kind of Coldplay nightmare for me. First we get Paradise which turned out to be yet another underwhelming pop song to go with ETIAW. Now we have to have a generic pop artist on the song that could have saved the album? Coldplay may earn some new fans with this album, by they're going to lose alot of it's original fanbase. Moving to Mars is the best thing they've done this era and it's not even on the album. Coldplay used to be one of the most exciting bands around, but now they've been reduced to a cheesy pop band, and not a very good one at that. For the first time ever I'm actually considering giving the album a miss. I haven't heard anything so far that has made me interested in the album.

I would have called it 'Generic Pop'. Why not tell it like it is eh?

Nah, Chris is the only band member credited as a writer on Sex and Violence. It's more of a solo thing rather than a Coldplay song.

Oh right, so you're not allowed to say anything negative about Coldplay because you're on a Coldplay fansite? OK.

I don't think there'll be any hidden tracks this time. Having a hidden track upsets the balance between Side A and Side B. As it stands there's 7 tracks on each side. That guitar thing at the end of UATW is almost certainly the transition into M.M.I.X rather than a hidden track.

It looks like Side A is the more positive, happy side and Side B is more negative and sinister at the start, but it gets more positive again with Don't Let It Break Your Heart and Up With The Birds.

The whole point of doing a new tour is to promote their new album. That means they'll play a large number of songs from MX rather than old songs. There's no way they'll leave The Scientist, Yellow, Viva La Vida and Fix You off the setlist. They'll probably leave the new version of GPASUYF in too.

REX and Golden Arrow have never been confirmed to be song titles and they don't appear on ASCAP or the PRS so I doubt that they're songs at all. It's funny how everybody assumed they were song titles just because they were written on the piano. Car Kids could be on the album but under a different title like how Space Symphony became Moving to Mars. Car Kids could actually have become Charlie Brown and the cartoon heart lyric was taken from Cartoon Heart which was scrapped. Similar to how lyrics were used in Christmas Lights from Wedding Bells after it was scrapped.

The strings sound amazing, the first part of the clip was really promising but the bit where Chris started singing wasn't as good. It sounds like a Chris Brown pop song to me but without the autotuning. The way he sings para-para-paradise is pretty stupid and cements its position as a pop song. He also plays the piano like in one of those pop songs where each chord is played once. I don't want to make a full judgment yet but it sounds average at best so far. It certainly sounds better than ETIAW but I'm not impressed so far.