Coldplay

Anyone who remembers what it meant to be a teenage britpopper in the 2000s will remember that sense of disorientation: Blur and Oasis hiding their midlife crises behind pale experimentalism, Radiohead even more openly disowning “OK Computer” by kicking off their experimental period with “Kid A”. In April '99, The Verve split up.

In truth, a small sign of the genre's imminent evolution - and of English pop in general - had already appeared with "The Man Who" by Travis, and that boat on the English Channel with a clean-faced lad sporting a barely-there quiff, singing in the rain: "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?"

It felt a bit like britpop, for better or worse, had been through rehab, turned inward in tone and themes, weighed down by the ghost of the great national-populist wave ("The radio keeps playing all the usual/ And what's a Wonderwall anyway?", also from "The Man Who"), all the while aware it couldn't fully shake it off. But that wouldn't hold true for every band born in that era.

On 26 June 2000, back when videos (and MTV, for that matter) still meant something, another lad with a decidedly English pallor appeared in MTV's rotation, walking in the dark along a beach in Dorset to sing "Look at the stars/ look how they shine for you" and plenty of other lines among the most naive imaginable - perhaps one of the most embarrassing lyrics to recount out loud among all-time pop hits.

And yet it's precisely that naive aura that makes "Yellow", the first true hit by Coldplay, so irresistible - even if only by chance, since Chris Martin isn't used to being front and centre, and indeed seems, at least at first, visibly self-conscious; or maybe it's the smile that flickers in his eyes when he chases after the camera a beat too late.

These impressions, which go beyond "meaning" and any intellectual overanalysis, are what remains of "Yellow": its driving riff, a kind of reckless bend that seems to drag the whole body along with it, beyond the falsetto and the choirboy harmonies of the chorus, and which certainly reaches places the song's flimsy lyrics can't. But how can you separate what's written from what's heard when talking about music?

Indeed, before even considering the songwriting, "Parachutes" finds its strength in the performances and, perhaps above all, in the recording and production (all captured live in Ken Nelson's studio-room in Liverpool): a moving warmth, an irresistibly naive and purely childlike expressiveness radiates from every note, sending chills through the nervy serenade of "Shiver", where Chris Martin climbs into his falsetto in a kind of garage-band take on Jeff Buckley; or in the full-band entrance of "Trouble", a genuine chamber-rock masterstroke, with that piano-voice/full-band alternation that Coldplay would later only manage to reprise in a caricatured, simplistic way, earning themselves a reputation as crowd-pleasing and saccharine (see "The Scientist", "Fix You" etc., where Martin's close-up is trotted out again, far more self-consciously and awkwardly).

The latter features a linear, square melody - more American than English, one might say - which stands as an exception on a record that, for all the clarity and polish of its songs, still houses several tracks hard to imagine without genuine talent for music and its dynamics: the gloomily menacing "Spies", which explodes into one of the band's signature build-ups, here recalling the britpop of Manic Street Preachers; the "new acoustic movement" number (a label they're associated with, though it undersells their influence even on more critically "respected" bands such as Other Lives and Elbow) that is "Sparks", where, as the tone dips, the quality of the interplay between band members shines through, along with the complementary simplicity of the arrangements - the circular bass movements, the punctuating electric guitar, the clear acoustic tone, the understated drums, the never-forced vocal range.

A simplicity that clashes with the overstuffed arrangements and productions of the Nineties, as the cover already hints, reducing the era's tangle of symbols and references to a lone globe spinning on its axis, a warm light in the darkness.

"Parachutes" is, in short, a "milestone" album also for the instant familiarity it creates with the listener, capable of sparking flashes of recognition even years later. The awkward crooner-turn "Everything's Not Lost" is perhaps one of the most telling moments in this regard, a final sigh of relief that turns into an instrumental question mark, concealing a closing, consoling ghost track, aware that only love can save us from the spies and the webs we get tangled in.

After all, "We Never Change" - and that's precisely the strength of early Coldplay, and of great pop music in general: the ability to make us (re)discover who we are, with few words but a great deal of feeling.

I want to live life

We never learn, do we?

Ride the wave of great music

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19/07/2015