Recently I was gifted with a copy of Coldplay's Viva la Vida - I knew nothing about the band except that they'd won a boatload of Grammys, that lead singer Chris Martin is married to Gwenyth Paltrow, names his offspring after fruit, and made the cover of a recent issue of Rolling Stone by himself. (I can imagine the grumbling that caused amoungst other members of the band - the sort that inspires thoughts of "I'm going to strike out on my own", until one remembers the scads of money one is making and the fact that one has just put a down payment on that summer home in Fiji. Then such rebellious thoughts are quietly tucked away until the aforementioned summer home is paid off.)

So I had no clue as to their music and went in with no preconceived notions of it. Having given it several spins on my player, I wanted to say, first off, that - it doesn't suck. (Is not sucking a valid critical virtue?) It has less the quality of an album of potential radio hits than a sort of song cycle of sorts, which in and of itself is a virtue. And yet it's actually rather catchy in places, such as "You didn't get to heaven but you made it close" Bummer. (Paging Neil Gaimon, the plot of your next book has arrived.) The tenth track on the album, "Death and All His Friends" is amoung my favorite as well - or I should say, the middle third of it. That particular song in question is an odd one, for it actually sounds like three different short songs pinned together, with only a whisper of a backbeat to link them together. (I actually had to double check my player to make sure the CD had not changed tracks throughout.)

But as I listen to it - and I've listened several times, what it reminds me of on several occasions is U2's "The Joshua Tree". At certain points, I expect to hear the transcendant opening riff of "Where the Streets Have No Name". (I even pulled out my copy of Joshua Tree to make sure I wasn't imagining things.) Throw in a dash of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, a splash of Sting (in the indecipherability of the lyrics and the emphasis on a single theme that walks that thin line between literary and artsy-fartsy) and a bit of Neil Gamon and you have it.

Now, all creators, all artists imitate to some degree what has come before. No one creates out of a vacuum. And it has only been in the 20th century that "originality" has been prized above all else artistically. Centuries of art - music, painting, literature - has depended upon the repetition of familiar themes (Madonna and Child, Oedipus Complex, war, love death etc) with slight twists to make it fresh. Ones anticedents were always acknowledged without shame. So if Viva la Vida reminds me of older, (and sometimes) better albums - and encourages me to give them a spin again on my CD player, there's no sin in that. And its tuneful - and it reminds me of other artists I enjoy - enough that it won't be banished to my "reject" pile any time soon.

Listening to it, however, I can easily imagine being a musician of highly original music (say, Derek Windle, whose music sounds like no one else I have ever heard, or David Grey whose brilliant 1998 CD White Ladder was sadly overlooked), looking at the success of Coldplay and saying to myself in frustration "WTF? Why can't I get anyone to listen to my stuff?"