Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)

I kept hearing this amazing song on the radio at work, but I could somehow never catch what it was or who it was by; and it took me about a year to work out that it was actually Coldplay. This came as something of a surprise because although admittedly it sort of sounded like Coldplay in slightly more pensive mood, it sounded better than Coldplay.

I never developed any particular loathing for Coldplay, but never saw any particular mystery in the idea that anyone might have done so. They sounded like an absurdly formulaic version of something which might have been more listenable under other circumstances, music for estate agents and automotive commercials, music for photogenic home insurance couples who'd listen to U2 but would rather not have to think about those kids in Africa with flies on their faces - corporate angst; and that's even before we get to Gwyneth's fanny candles.

Nevertheless, God Put a Smile Upon Your Face really wormed its way into my head - a song which sounds like the moment before a thunderstorm stretched out to three minutes, a depressive, doom-laden crescendo running away from itself. I would have bought the 7" but I'm not sure it existed, and CD singles always seemed like a bit of a waste of time, so here I am with an entire album - eleven fucking tracks. Strangely, tracks two to five were all singles, preserved here as a big chunk of hits at the beginning of the album and serving as a lesson in why it's taken me two decades to buy a cheap second-hand copy. It's not that In My Place, Clocks, or The Scientist are poor songs so much as that they're the same fucking song, and hearing it every thirteen minutes or so on whatever turdy indie station we kept it locked to at work used to get pretty fucking painful some weeks. Hearing them again after twenty years without the additional gurgling testimony of Jono Coleman or Christian O'Connell or some other dreadful fucking twat is less painful than I expected, and the more I listen, the more obvious it becomes that it's the context rather than the songs. This may also tally with the fact that God Put a Smile Upon Your Face didn't do anything like so well as the other three singles and never quite got to the point of outstaying its welcome at East Dulwich SDO.

Starting again at the beginning, allowing Coldplay a fair crack at the whip and ignoring both the terrible name and unfortunate association with Gwyneth's fanny candles, this isn't a bad album. In fact I find it unusually listenable. It isn't really that the good stuff amounts to the tracks which weren't singles, although there's a subtle difference in mood which probably accounts for In My Place, Clocks and The Scientist having been picked out; but the material you may not already have heard a million times somehow sounds more like a real band, and certainly less formulaic in pushing all those emo buttons with wistful verses building up to the same crescendo every time. Wikipedia gives their influences as bog standard hyper-mainstream shite but to me they sound like a post-psychedelic band, essentially Codeine with bigger production and Beatley chord changes; and this album is a lot more depressive than you might expect. I realise that this record should be shite but isn't probably doesn't fully qualify as praise, but I'm still slightly stunned to find myself listening to Coldplay and enjoying it. Had we never heard of them, had we not had to endure so many years of having them shoved down our throats over and over and over, it might be easier to listen past the bullshit and appreciate what they do.

Codeine - Frigid Stars (1990)

Everybody loves Mr. Unpopular the manic-depressive outsider, the tortured poet, the guy who just doesn't fit in, and particularly if he has a square jaw, dreamy blue eyes, and that little boy lost quality which works so well for Johnny Depp in whichever version of Alice Tim Burton has recycled this month. That's commercial, as Borgia Ginz will tell you. This probably explains the success of Nirvana, and how their rise to power wiped less successful, less conspicuously Beatly but I think more musically interesting groups out of the picture like the saaaaaaad losers they all were with their hilariously awkward and distinctly un-hunky brainiac frontmen. Ha! What did any of their lot ever know about alienation, the retard n00bs etc. etc.

Actually, I have no idea whether Codeine would have been fucking enormous if not for the distraction of Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I suppose it seems fairly unlikely. I guess my point is that this was more like the real deal in some respects - awkward, not very photogenic, and not something you would have heard at a party. I first encountered Frigid Stars when my friend Andrew lent it to me back in the nineties. I played it maybe twice but couldn't really get into it, which was a shame seeing as Andrew clearly rated it very highly, being a somewhat depressive personality.

Andrew died in 2009, leaving me with a possibly vestigial pang of guilt that I never made the effort with this record, not that it would have made any difference; and so obviously I bought it when I happened upon this copy in the racks at CD Exchange.

I can see why it took so long. Codeine were well named. Their songs are glacially slow to the point of tunes only being apparent if you play the thing at 78RPM so as to artificially bunch all those dwindling notes together; but on the other hand, this material really does grow on you if you're in the right frame of mind, that being the same sort of mood which allows for a full appreciation of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea - another of Andrew's faves by the way. Frigid Stars is a little like early Swans in terms of pace and mood, but without any of the usual notational tricks generally employed to invoke doom; so the chords and the general structure is actually quite gentle and beautiful, if admittedly reluctant to pull on its dancing shoes. It's like being wrapped in cotton wool, and was - I suppose - one of many precursors to emo, except from what I can tell emo seems to have come from the marginally later generation whose first emotional crisis was experienced on the fourth level of Super Mario Kart rather than out here in the real world interacting with people who don't wear eyeliner. To get back to the point, I have an unfortunate hunch that Frigid Stars very much represents what it felt like to be my friend Andrew, and so I find this quite a powerful record in 2009 because I still miss him. I don't know if that's a recommendation or not, but at least I can see why he lent it to me.