This came out in 2005 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Chris Martin is a rock star. A millionaire. A new father. And oh yeah, he sleeps next to Gwyneth Paltrow every night. In short, dude’s got everything. But to him, that just seems to mean he’s got everything to lose.
Martin’s seemingly unfounded insecurity may be tough to fathom sometimes — but listening to Coldplay’s stellar third album X&Y, it’s easy to appreciate just how magnificently fragile he is. And the magnificent lengths he’ll go to express his vulnerabiity.
The 13-track disc is a yin-yang opus of love and dread, daring and uncertainty, yearning and hesitancy, with Martin perpetually poised on a precipice, urging himself to take control of his life but hamstrung by the fear of failure. “Every step you take could be your biggest mistake,” he frets at one point; then he decides “every chance you get is a chance you seize;” but not before he ponders what to do “when you try your best but don’t succeed.” And so it goes for much of the disc.
Lucky for him, the rest of Coldplay make a superb support group for his emotional needs. Wrapping his keening voice and swooping falsetto in a lush blanket of chiming guitars, supple Britrock grooves and sharp production that commands your attention without overwhelming it, the band — guitarist Jonny Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion — fashion impeccably elegant works that approach the anthemic majesty of U2, mixed with haunting echoes of everyone from Kraftwerk and Radiohead to Prince and Pink Floyd.
Granted, at first blush, few of these tracks seem to possess the immediacy — or the ambitious grandeur — of A Rush Of Blood To The Head. But that’s not a complaint; if anything, it only makes sense that these cuts are slightly smaller and more intimate. And maybe it’s because we can put a face to his muse these days, but Martin has never sounded more personal than he does on Gwynethcentric cuts like What If and Fix You.
Word is it took Coldplay 18 months of writing, recording and revision to create X&Y. All I can is, if it takes that level of self-doubt to create an album like this, we hope Martin never gets it together.
