Results tagged “coldplay”

A lot of people, when they first hear Duffy (MySpace), might have a knee-jerk reaction of, "Oh, that girl is just trying to sound like Amy Winehouse." It's an understandable, if not entirely fair, reaction to the 24-year-old Welsh singer's brand of neo-soul music. Duffy's music is, at its best, a heck of a lot more thoughtful and personal than Winehouse's. At a minimum, Duffy is unencumbered by the melodrama that seems to consume Winehouse—both musically and personally.

At tonight's Coldplay show at the Wachovia Center, it'll be one of the first times in a while that we'll be actually looking forward to a band playing mostly new tracks. We have been digging Viva la Vida. After the stuffy snoozefest that was XY, Viva la Viva feels like a breath of fresh air. But wait, the air is not exactly fresh, it's tinged with something slightly psychedelic. It's fitting that the first track is called "Life in Technicolor." It's like the band remembered there were more colors and sounds than "epic" and "orchestral." One reviewer referred to the band as "British art-rockers," and although when we think art rock we think TV on the Radio more than Coldplay, we can't deny that the band seems to be pushing its musical boundaries on this album. Almost every song has an arrangement that signals the band was seeking reinvention rather than resigning itself to a tried and true formula. Viva gets at that creativity that initially drew us to the band.

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