18 years ago today, Coldplay released Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. It still sucks.
This was supposed to be the brave one — the big reinvention. They put a Delacroix painting of an actual revolution on the cover, zipped themselves into surplus-store military jackets, and hired Brian Eno to scuff up the corners. Then they handed in the most focus-grouped record of the decade. You cannot cosplay as the barricades and write songs engineered to play under a phone commercial at the same time. The title track is a man who has never lost anything in his life pretending he used to rule the world, and a planet of people who’d never stormed anything decided that counted as catharsis. The jacket is a costume. The band wearing it is exactly who you always knew they were.
The part that actually gets me is the year they pulled it off in. 2008 was stacked. Disco was clawing its way back out of the ground, French house was at full tilt, and the weirder corners of dance music were having the best run they’d had in years — and you could hear every bit of it for free. People had options. They chose the guy in the Napoleon coat.
Here’s what you should listen to instead — five tracks from 2008 that actually meant it:
- Hercules and Love Affair — Blind (Antony singing over a disco bassline. This is what reinvention sounds like when it isn’t a marketing plan.)
- Justice — DVNO
- Cut Copy — Hearts on Fire
- Friendly Fires — Paris
- Lindstrøm — Where You Go I Go Too (Thirty minutes of space disco. More ideas in the first five than the whole castle song.)