#AlbumPick – Viva La Vida (Prospekt’s march edition)

The English quartet that started as a jangly indie band has grown increasingly more reliant on fluffy orchestral arrangements to deliver their dramatic brand of rock with each passing release. Those colorful iTunes commercials, blaring the title track of their latest, would lead you to believe that they have fully embraced overstuffed, string-laced dream pop.

Thankfully, that could not be further from the truth. Rather than continuing the trend, Chris Martin and crew have taken two steps back and one to the left for what sounds like a reboot of Coldplay’s sound.

As evidenced by the lavish production on “Viva La Vida“, they have not given up on their orchestral pop sound completely. Rather, they seem to have taken the fragile acoustic sounds of Parachutes, the edgier side of A Rush Of Blood To The Head, and the silky sounds of X & Y and cobbled together the best bits of each to expand upon for a more worldly direction for the band.

The album tears open with a dazzlingly beautiful two-and-a-half-minute instrumental piece, “Life In Technicolor”. It seemed for a while as though the albums were sounding less like a band, and more like ‘The Chris Martin Project’, as the production pushed his voice front and center in the middle of swelling orchestra, with the band somewhere in the background. The restless instrumental is a nice reminder that they know how to rock.

Stream