La Vida No Loca.('Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends')(Sound recording review)

In a 2005 piece in the Times, Jon Pareles called the British rock group Coldplay "the most insufferable band of the decade," and he placed the blame on the band's front man and singer, Chris Martin, whom he called a "passive-aggressive blowhard." Earlier this year, in a study sponsored by the hotel chain Travelodge of the bedtime habits of 2,248 people in the U.K., Coldplay topped a poll of music choices that would help people fall asleep. Coldplay apparently relieves what Travelodge called the "pressures of modern living." Martin may use the same metric to judge his band's music. On coldplay.com, you can find a handwritten note, dated "Thursday 12 June London," that addresses the recent release of the band's fourth studio album, "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends." "I feel very relieved that the album is finally released out into the big wide world today," it says. "I hope there's songs on there that will make a shit day slightly less shit, or a good day even better." The album sold more than seven hundred thousand copies in the first week of its release in the United States. (Since the group's debut album, "Parachutes," was released, in 2000, news items about the troubled entertainment conglomerate EMI routinely correlate the health of the corporation with the health of Coldplay.)

Is Coldplay warm milk or just quietly dependable? Don't ask Martin, who has transformed the English art of diffidence into a masochistic religion: "We owe them a career, really," he has said of Radiohead. He has also said, "Like millions of people in the world, I can't listen to Coldplay." He's half right about Radiohead--Coldplay exhibits a taste for melancholy and smeared, stretched-out sounds that leads straight back to Thom Yorke and his friends. The main antecedent is U2, who invented the form that Coldplay works within: rock that respects the sea change of punk but still wants to be as chest-thumping and anthemic as the music of the seventies stadium gods. Translated, this means short pop songs that somehow summon utterly titanic emotions and require you to skip around in triumphant circles and pump your fist, even if it is not entirely clear what you are singing about.

The link to U2 has been made explicit on "Viva la Vida," which was co-produced by Brian Eno, the man who moved U2 from a feisty, soccer-chant style into the expansive and hypnotic sound that has defined the rest of their career. The problem is that Coldplay doesn't seem to have unplumbed depths, or a voice as distinctive as either Bono's or the Edge's, whose guitar is U2's second vocalist. The guys in Coldplay are a sweet bunch, and their best songs are modest affairs. "Yellow" was the track that made them famous eight years ago. There's some guitar work that echoes the Edge's--chiming, small chords played high on the neck and repeated, over and over, pushing the song away from the divisions of song form and closer to the ecstasy of the drone (when it works)--but the core of the song is Martin serenading someone with the oldest trick in the book: "Look at the stars, look how they shine for you, and all the things that you do." It's a big fat "Aw!," and it gets me every time.

"Yellow" is one of Martin's few straightforward lyrics. For the band's second album, Martin started singing in free-floating slogans. "Am I part of the cure? Or am I part of the disease?" is a line from "Clocks," perhaps the group's loveliest song. The music evokes the song's name, revolving around three circling and falling piano arpeggios. The payoff comes when Martin stretches out the words "you are" in a falsetto sung over the piano figure. You are what? Go figure, and I haven't the slightest idea what is going on with the "tides" and ...