Viva la revolution (Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends - Coldplay)

Member Name: bailey_kipper_uk

Product:	Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends - Coldplay
Date:	21/06/08 (89 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good new album, will grow on you

Disadvantages: Needs a few listens to grow on you...

So its been 3 years since X & Y came out, it was a great album and had one of my all time favourite songs in "Fix You". So there has been a lot of expectation around Viva la Vida and whether it could live up to expectations.

The album goes like this:

**1 - Life in Technicolor begins the album, it's a 99% instrumental track, with a constant rhythm throughout and just building up in volume and other instruments as it trundles along, nothing offensive nothing else to it. 6/10

**2 - Cemeteries of London - A pretty good song, quite upbeat, good summer concert song. Not much to it, quite short at about 3 minutes long. 7/10

**3 - "Lost" is the next song, luckily it's not about the ongoing mini series, however it is named after it, as Chris Martin loves it. There's no chorus to this and it works really well. It's a great Coldplay song and another festival style song. 8/10

**4 - The next song is "42". Another bloody Lost reference, as this is one of the numbers from the series and also a reference to the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy. It's another good song which seems split slightly into two parts. The first part is quite relaxed and the other half is much more rocky and has a couple of repetitions of the chorus and not much else. 7.5/10

**5 - This actually is two songs the first is Lovers in Japan. Mostly made up of a chorus and a couple of short verses. It's a good album song, upbeat, sung well and top tappingly great. The next part is Reign of Love, which is a nice little piano based track, not much you can say about it other than it's mainly just Chris playing the Piano well, as he often does. 6/10

**6 - Viva la Vida, the title track, has done very well in America and became the first track by a British band to go to number 1 for almost a decade. Most people will probably have heard bits of this track as it has been featured on I-tunes ads recently. It's a very string oriented track and this gives it a great backing throughout the track for Chris to sing over. All the way through the track Chris is singing at the level most people manage, rather than as much up at the upper echelons of his vocal range. This is a great song. 9/10

**7 - The next song Violet Hill takes a while to get going, but once it does it is another great track. It's an anti-war protest at heart, with some great lyrics. Every time I hear this song I think of Chris Martin thumping his fist in time to the drum beat. It was initially available free and was downloaded over 2 millions times from the bands website, amazing. 10/10.

**8 - Strawberry Swing, it's a good chance for Chris to sing and the song trundles along nicely, Chris is feeling in a chirpy mood and this comes through in this song. 6.5/10

**9 - Death and all his Friends is the other song that makes up the album title, more upbeat and rocky than the previous track and this is another good track - 8/10

**10 - The Escapist is the last track on the album, bit of a filler - 4/10.

Overall it's a great album with a different sound to their last albums, partly due to a variety of instruments they have used and also partly down to the way it's been produced by Brian Eno (of U2 - Joshua Tree fame). I give it my two thumbs up.

Summary: Good, slightly different fourth album from a great UK band.