timeo

THE BACKSTREET BOYS are performing on the same night? Ha, that's hilarious. I'm just picturing them dancing at the same time to 20,000 people outside. "BACKSTREET'S BACK!" :rolleyes:

Hey, thanks for spending the time to think and write this all out, it must have taken you a long time. I'm not sure that it's a myth over whether Radiohead themselves dislike Coldplay, since there does seem to be legitimate actions and anecdotal evidence that suggests that they aren't fans really, but in the end, it doesn't really matter what their opinions on Coldplay or their music is. For the most part, I agree with what was written, that Coldplay are caught between the two divergent paths that Radiohead and U2 have chosen, both bands good musically, but completely different on how they've dealt with fame and stardom. I mean, look no further than Live 8. U2 completely snapped it up, ready to perform at a moment's notice. Radiohead declines because Johnny Greenwood's wife is having a baby. I'm not sure what path that I'd rather have Coldplay take, because they're both respectable things. I suppose it'd be nice for Coldplay to have universal fame, but I feel that they're our group, the band for people who loved their initial acousticy sound and not the stadium anthem-ish sounds that they've been aspiring to lately. I realise that they need to move on and do something different, but there's that reluctance. And in their haste to be so inclusive as U2 are, the new album seems to have become...not as beautiful and meaningful as their initial two were. You can be open and inclusive yet cryptic and personal at the same time. You can also be hard to understand yet stadium-ish at the same time too I think. I don't know how to do it myself, but I'm looking forward to when they'll show everyone.

I've either not heard the rest of the albums or liked them enough myself that I wouldn't publicly slag them off, which is why I chose not to extend myself further than my reach. Nonetheless, I stand by all the comments that I've made, and those albums have been judged in my opinion to be found wanting and lacking. You can defend them however you wish and in the process, have trashed Coldplay as much as you want, but you haven't changed my mind, nor anyone else's. If your intention is to stir up shit and act like a stupid troll who's got nothing else better to do, you've done a pretty good job. But not good enough to keep anybody around long enough to listen to your rantings and ravings in the future. I see now that indulging in your petty fantasies was a mistake. I'll be sure not to repeat it.

Not an appreciative audience, just a person who's willing to indulge in the vast vats of your self-importance and ego for the moment. Now if you'll stop conflating the issues, I don't think anybody here claimed that X&Y was the best album of 2005, just that it wasn't lame, tedious, reprehensible, middling or any of the other adjectives that you'd use to describe it. As for your list, you have a pretty large one going in there, of which many albums or EP's are highly overrated or downright suck. Beck? Past the shelf life already, do not listen to spoiled goods. Bloc Party? Vastly overrated shite, same with Architecture in Helsinki, Autechre, Caribou and Gorillaz and LCD Soundsystem. MIA's just dull, Mu's simply stupid aimless screeching, and Queens of the Stone Age certainly makes me wish I was back in the Stone Age. I'd suggest that you go find yourself some good music, and when you do, then feel free to come back and lecture us on the ways of the art of listening. Until then, you're in no position to say otherwise.

http://www.emi.fi/pics/gallery/coldplay1.jpg http://www.emi.fi/pics/gallery/coldplay2.jpg http://www.emi.fi/pics/gallery/coldplay3.jpg http://www.emi.fi/pics/gallery/coldplay4.jpg http://www.emi.fi/pics/gallery/coldplay5.jpg

These were from the gig at Koko on Monday right?

State your idea of great music and we'll see whether you're this supposed conisseur of fine and non-"middling" music. Get on with it Socrates, we're waiting. I think I might like Some Cities more than X&Y actually. The latter has more variety for sure, but there are just so many god damn solid songs from SC...ARoBTTH is stronger than The Last Broadcast and I'd say Parachutes is probably better than Lost Souls by a bit. Still, two amazing bands though.

They judge mostly on whether it's indie or cool enough. Neither of those adjectives can really be used to describe Coldplay. Hence hatred and general vitriole. In today's Toronto Star, Section C5 (when I read where it was, I thought it was A5, and I was like WHOA, they've moved up in the world, but nope...I just hadn't had my coffee at the time, heh): Coldplay feels the heat While it doesn't achieve leap of predecessor, it's easy to like BEN RAYNER Getting crowned "the biggest band on the planet" is the stuff of which rock 'n' roll dreams are made, but one still can't help but feel a twinge of compassion for the amiable lads in Coldplay. The British quartet's third album, X&Y, drops today, and the soaring expectations placed upon it seem nearly impossible to meet. An entire record label's financial future hangs in the balance, while the members of Coldplay are rumoured to have tied themselves in knots during the record's 18-month gestation period trying to come up with the Ultimate Artistic Statement, their very own OK Computer or Joshua Tree. If it sells anything less than 12 million copies and isn't universally acclaimed as the greatest album of all time, it's likely doomed (most irrationally) to be dubbed a "disappointment." In town for a three-day blitz of interviews, radio and MuchMusic appearances and a hot-ticket club gig at Kool Haus last month, frontman Chris Martin and guitarist Jonny Buckland were nonetheless putting a commendably brave face on their predicament. "We're in the eye of the hurricane, really," says Martin, 28, a thoughtful character who shares a loopy sense of humour with his old schoolmate and guitar player. "Although the brain can visualize space and everything, it's impossible to see anything other than your own perspective. So while we're aware there's all this stuff going on around our album, we don't see it." "We just sit in this room and people come in and we chat," says Buckland. X&Y seems almost predestined to be one of the year's biggest albums, but Coldplay and its record company, EMI — which recently pinned a 5 per cent drop in annual revenues squarely on the band's failure to meet its deadlines — have been taking no chances with its fate. No media outlet, it seems, has been left untouched in a pre-release promo assault that included a warm-up tour of smallish venues that sold out within minutes in each city, while the album itself was kept under strict lock and key until just last week to avoid Internet piracy. To acquire advance interviews, reporters had to sign agreements pledging that stories such as this one would run within a week of X&Y's release, thus guaranteeing separate press hits for the club tour and the album's in-store date. "We only got a sense of that once we'd finished it, or we only let ourselves get a sense of it once we were finished," says Martin, also adjusting to paparazzi-besieged life as a celebrity husband and father since marrying actress Gwyneth Paltrow in 2003. "It's fine, though. No matter how much pressure comes from outside, it's never as much pressure as trying to have to impress your drummer. It doesn't matter if 10 million other people like it, if Will (Champion), our drummer, doesn't like it, it's not gonna happen. And it'll piss you right off. "He's also the physically strongest, so it's not worth arguing with him. He could mash you to a pulp." Whether or not external influences had anything to do with it, X&Y took a maddeningly long time to gel. A plan to "record it very quickly and then have a bit of a holiday," as Buckland laughingly puts it, went out the window about six months in when Coldplay scrapped a pile of early songs that had had the soul Pro-Tooled out of them and "just sounded like any other band." Regrouping in its rehearsal space, the band set about writing "in a live environment, rather than a studio environment," says Martin, and gradually bashed out the 13 stadium-sized emo-rockers and female-melting ballads ("We're trying to resurrect the power ballad," he quips) that eventually came together this winter as X&Y. "I never remember getting my homework in on time, but I always thought it was better to hand it in good and a bit late than sh-- and on time," offers Martin. "It was really very exciting to make, but the flipside to `exciting' — the X to its Y — was that it was very hard at times, or seemingly disastrous because anything that wasn't a peak was a trough. For about six months, we were sort of going along on an even keel and it wasn't very interesting for us, so once we started doing something exciting, everything else was terrible." "The highs got higher, the lows got much lower," adds Buckland. "Not until you really like a lot of it do you know the kind of shape it will take, and not until you've got a lot of it do you know what else you need." X&Y doesn't achieve the kind of giant leap Coldplay made between its modest 2000 debut, Parachutes, and 2002's blustery A Rush of Blood to the Head, eschewing experimentation for a confident refinement of its predecessor's self-consciously epic songwriting and an emphasis on even bigger sonics. It's a very easy record to like, however, thanks to Martin's gift for poignant, gracefully propulsive melodies and just-clever-enough lyrics that take on an elevated air of import when sung back at the stage by an arena full of fans. There's a Radiohead-ish spaciness to the uncharacteristically bitter "Twisted Logic," a squall of My Bloody Valentine guitars on "Low," a riff from Kraftwerk's "Computer Love" incorporated into "Talk." The lovely hidden track, "Til Kingdom Come," was originally written for Johnny Cash, but could just as easily fit among the acoustic tracks on Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy. Most of the record, however, bears out the frequent assertion that Coldplay is the band most likely to unseat U2 as the planet's most widely adored rock stars. Martin's malleable voice is a dead ringer for Bono's on such tracks as the cathartic, death-obsessed weepie "Swallowed in the Sea," while the rest of the band — particularly Buckland, whose keening guitar lines on "Square One" might as well have been played by the Edge — appears to have schooled itself in the airy expanses of The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, before recording. The admitted fans in Coldplay, naturally, are chuffed to be mentioned in the same breath as U2, let alone to be nipping at Bono's haughty heels. They are nonetheless quick to express gratitude for being able to live the dream lives they've suddenly found themselves living. "This is kind of crazy," says Martin. "We flip between having a great amount of confidence and also a woeful self-image. We saw a picture of us today and we were, like, `How the f--- does anybody believe in us? We look like a bunch of twats.' But we have great artwork, and we can always hide behind that. I think we're closer to being the new Pink Floyd because U2 has a more charismatic frontman with much better hair. "Jonny and I were just talking about this today. Why, out of all the people in history, are we not Greek farmers in the year 202? Why are we me and him? We just are. We have to be grateful for it and make as much of an effort as possible to validate it."

Jesus WHO CARES what these people have to say!? That's like asking what fans of The Who or The Killers think about X&Y. Their opinions, if they have them, are unimportant. The more attention you give, the more power you put on their words, and once again, why do we care?

Yeah, did that already. I figured another item that's signed wouldn't hurt. Plus, it's better than getting the CD single instead (which I also got).

I'm listening to it right now for the second time ever! Hahaa, it's really exciting.

Aw, but it's COLDPLAY. It's totally worth it. Actually I'm just excited that the songs on my album costs less than $1/song.

Isn't 16.90 Euros pretty cheap for an album though? I mean I remember looking at the shops there and everything was around 20 Euros. They had sales, 2 for 20 euros, but in Canada, that translates to 1 album for $17 or so, which is...not on sale to say the least. Heh.

THERE GOES THE FEAR AGAIN.

Well there were only nine, what do you think? ric, awesome song!!!!!!! Haha, I don't think I've ever danced so hard by myself while listening to a song until I saw them doing that...

Heh, that's on par with what I expected from Pitchfork.

HMV Superstore in Toronto. I stood in line for three hours and was fifth in line, I better get a fucking poster!!!! There were only nine in total.

$9.99 CDN. $11.49 with tax. Plus I got a signed poster and two little cards that had pictures of them!! :)

I'll check them out when I have time, and I'll possibly see them at NxNE this Friday....(hopefully they're one of the earlier acts)! Thanks for the notice.

Haha, I like the constant progress-o-meter that you had there. :P The new album's pretty good. It's an instant hook! I wish they would come by my woods though...

Ha, at the one HMV in Waterloo? It's probably the same there too.

I was on TV! Multiple times! Haha, I think if you sequenced all the shots together, it'd be at least 3 seconds of me time.

Same here for HMV in Toronto. You can get a coupon in the Toronto Star, main section A. Otherwise it'll cost you $13.99!!

The only problem I have with the NY Times is their formatting: the ugly font, the terrible pictures, the ridiculously thin Saturday editions. Otherwise, I've usually found myself agreeing with them, but this time...no. Not a bit at all. And you know what? The entire article didn't really say much. Sure it gave a lot of information, but not ACTUAL information. He didn't really say anything about why he didn't like it, except for the fact that the lyrics didn't work for him and that it was "too perfect", but he never really explains his reasoning why they don't work for him (they sound fine to me), or how perfection is somehow bad. Hopefully this wasn't the actual review of the album, and that it was just a normal entertainment article. The New York Times doesn't have just a tremendous influence in NYC, but also in the US, and the world to a degree.

LUCKY! Where did you go? And did they do that random ballot system?