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Your support makes all the difference."Nobody said it was easy/ No one ever said that it would be this hard/ Oh take me back to the start," sings Chris Martin on "The Scientist", one of several tracks on this follow-up to Coldplay's five-million-selling Parachutes that seem to hanker after a return to more innocent, uncomplicated times.
Songs such as "Clocks" and "A Whisper" are replete with imagery of loss and regret, with the "ticking of clocks" and "cursed missed opportunities" too late to remedy. Combined with the methodical, mantra-like repetition of one or two chords that characterises many of the tracks, the overwhelming impression given by A Rush of Blood to the Head is of a band trapped by expectations, running on the spot, uncertain which way to move forward, or even whether backward might not be the best way to go. Hardly surprising, then, that the first single drawn from the album, "In My Place", should be the most direct in line of descent, stylistically, from Parachutes. Like "Trouble", it's an anthem of amorphous yearning designed to be as widely applicable as possible, an all-purpose wallow whose self-pitying, apologetic tone sounds utterly bogus: when Martin sings, "If you go, if you go/ And leave me down here on my own/ Then I'll wait for you", it's clear that we're the ones missing out, that though he may be down his smug self-sacrifice actually occupies the emotional high ground.
Equally unsurprising is the pronounced lack of engagement – in the existential sense – in these songs, an emptiness most glaring in the opening track, the ironically titled "Politik", whose list of vague demands betray a dismal lack of political coherence. Perhaps it's simply a sign of the times, a reflection of wider societal tropes: for just as Thatcherism brought a wave of arrogant, sod-you selfish celeb-ocracy to Eighties pop, so has Blairism all but wiped out the ideological component of modern pop. Not even Tony Blair, though, could be as bereft of driving principle as a band who sing – as Coldplay do in the title track here – "I'm going to buy a gun and start a war/ If you can tell me something worth fighting for." I mean: how long a list do you want, lads?
Musically, the main development in Coldplay's style is the increased use of piano as the core instrument – though since they utilise it in much the same way as they do the guitar, hammering away at as few chords as possible in a monotonal manner reminiscent of "shoegazer" bands, it's not really that much of a development at all. The band's saving graces remain Chris Martin's vocals and their knack for devising the elegant, wistful melodies that will doubtless help shift lorryloads of A Rush of Blood to the Head; but one wonders whether, when the rush has subsided, fans will be satisfied with what's left in the head.
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