100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Life in Technicolor

02 Cemeteries of London

03 Lost!

04 42

05 Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love

06 Yes

07 Viva la Vida

08 Violet Hill

09 Strawberry Swing

10 Death and All His Friends

It was as if the blinkers had been removed. After the diligent, emotionally dogmatic X&Y album of 2005, Coldplay exploded into life on Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, the kaleidoscopic long player that finally matched the English four-piece’s commercial success to an arresting artistic vision. Established parameters vanished, rules no longer applied.

It is not entirely surprising to find the name Brian Eno in the sleeve credits. The former Roxy Music maven has long been an influential producer and collaborator for bands hoping to break new ground, having had a hand in everything from the elevation of U2 in the 1980s to the invention of ambient music. Eno was one of three outside producers for the extensive Viva la Vida recording sessions, with added thanks for ‘sonic landscapes’. It’s a telling notation. Eno used keyboard pulses and background washes to define a song’s architecture – tracks acquire space, they breathe.

Viva La Vida makes good use of this framework. The sound is varied and expressive, and while there are 10 songs formally listed, several comprise diverse pieces that are contracted together, adding to the sense of depth. The album is not a left turn into artistic self-endowment, instead it gave new, varied voices to Coldplay’s obvious craftsmanship and the combination of the familiar and the unexpected lifted the band.

Songs cut in mid-beat and segue unexpectedly; they no longer have the stubbornly clear through line that previously made Coldplay so attractive to radio programmers. The track ‘42’ begins as a tender piano ballad, burnished by mournful strings, before it unexpectedly acquires a skittering beat and muscular bass. The latter part has the queasy majesty of post-punk champions Echo & the Bunnymen, one of several English icons subtly referenced; another is modernist composer Michael Nyman, who can be discerned in the deft, lyrical orchestration underpinning the title track.

Yet another presence, broader still, is London itself. Coldplay had rarely exhibited a particular sense of time or place – frontman Chris Martin’s constructs had traditionally been universal. But here, beginning with the rousing ‘Cemeteries of London’, he ruminates on the city’s history. Where a Ray Davies latches onto geography, Martin sees London as a collective memory. On the thumping, percussive single ‘Violet Hill’, lovers silently walk towards a favoured place, where they will forever part, imagining the strife that has previously swept these streets. Bibles and rifles are referenced – as the couple prepare for their own personal conflagration.

Previously Martin’s tendency was to avert such crises, but here he either invokes the pain without offering solace, or ignores it completely. Viva la Vida is instead thick with nods to the departed and the rituals of the dead. ‘You thought you might be a ghost/But you didn’t get to heaven but you made it close,’ he sings on ‘42’, setting up shop in the netherworld. The singer even takes a stab at carnal desire on the seven-minute epic ‘Yes’, a cut whose easterninfluenced instrumentation drifts off into a swooning, diffused ocean of noise. Coldplay’s ambitions are not always fulfilled, but even when they prove merely interesting – as with the Afropop of ‘Strawberry Swing’ – you’re left with a side of the band previously unseen.

Anything appeared possible for Coldplay after the release of Viva la Vida, and the rich breadth of music on the record was in no way an impediment to the band’s status as one of the decade’s few new stadium-filling acts. They didn’t come close to matching the moment on 2011’s Xylo Myloto, but if this is to be the group’s highpoint, then there’s no doubting just how far they leapt forward.