Coldplay comes out with a new album next week (that's the cover art to the left there), and to promote it, they have been offering the first single on the album, "Violet Hill," for free download on their website.
It seems like a decent track. I've only given it a half-dozen listens (so I'm just getting started on it), but I feel like I can make a few comments. The vocals remind me of . . . [gasp] . . . Phil Collins of Genesis, especially at the beginning. I think it's just the echo-ey vocal track.
The other thing that is different about this song, is that it has a really driving beat, harsh electric guitars, and thumping bass, almost overwhelming the Coldplay patented piano until the very end when the songs winds down into tinkling piano and soft voices.
All this harshening got me to thinking. What is it about Brit Rock that makes them run the music cycle? Hark back to the Beatles. They started all poppy and sweet, started rocking harder and harder, then became drug addicts and gave us trippy crap like Revolution 9 and the whole Revolver album.
I don't really care for the Beatles, but I do love U2. They've done their own cycle: love songs to rebel music to alternative to dance and back to more classic guitar rock. Edge keeps innovating and reinventing.
Radiohead started as Britain's guitar crunch, went jazz alternative on OK Computer, then went techno with Kid A, and have slowly been working their way back to the latest album In Rainbows, which I've had on constant rotation as I do dishes since it came out.
Now Coldplay is morphing. They've been doing it since their first album, but it was pretty gradual before. The next wave looks like it may skip two clicks on the evolutionary scale.
Maybe the cycle is why I like British rock. They innovate; they reinvent themselves. Look at Blur, for goodness sake. You don't see wussy American rockers experimenting to that extent, and that's why American rock is dying. Download that, RIAA.
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