#1466: Coldplay – Viva la Vida

Leave a reply

Guys, it’s ‘Viva la Vida’. “I used to rule the world / But that was when I ruled the world”. You know how it goes. The biggest thing I remember about the track from the time of its release was the controversy in its similarity to guitarist Joe Satriani’s song ‘If I Could Fly’. And, uh, it wasn’t hard to notice how much the melody in Chris Martin’s vocal and Satriani’s guitar were near identical. The matter was settled out of court. Otherwise, this song was damn near everywhere in 2008 / 09. Just Coldplay in general seemed to own that time, I feel like along with Beyoncé. Got their own iTunes advert and stuff. ‘Viva la Vida’ was the first proper, pure pop song the band did, and I think its existence annoyed a lot of people. Coldplay were seen as uncool anyway. But now, even some fans of the band were heading for the exit. A selling out had occurred. “Parachutes to X&Y, fantastic. The band have lost their way now.” Something along those lines. They didn’t know how good they had it then. If the band were making pop like this today, I’d probably still be a fan. As it is, I stand by a firm opinion that Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends is the best piece of work by Coldplay. Their last great album. They could release a masterpiece in the next few years. They could. I’m not holding my breath.

You may notice that the video above is a little different to the official version. I’m very sure the alternate video for the song, directed by Anton Corbijn, was the first of the two I saw. I always liked it more, and it should have been the only one. It’s basically the video for Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy the Silence’, which Corbijn also directed, but while the protagonist remains alone at the end of that video, Chris Martin is joined by his other bandmates in a sign of solidarity. It’s nice. From an artistic point of view, I also think it suits the song much better, much more than the “band performs song with visuals reminiscent of the album cover” thing going on in the Hype Williams-directed video. And Hype Williams has done so many iconic videos too, he could have gone all out on this one. Oh, well. I haven’t really talked about the ins and outs of the music as I would usually do at this stage of a post. That’s really because it’s ‘Viva la Vida’, innit? Like, everybody knows it. You sing “I used to rule the world” and then everything else follows. The strings are probably in your head right now. Admittedly, there were a number of years where I did not listen to the track. Probably because I was turned off by how much I couldn’t get away from it. It was maybe only a few years ago when I sat down, listened to it again and changed my mind. It’s a very memorable melody throughout the whole song, it must be said. It was never as annoying as I once thought it was. Chris Martin’s best vocals are all over Viva la Vida…, you know.

The track is from the point of view of a man who was once king and now is not. He finds himself among the common people, sweeping the streets [he] used to own, and he’s just reminiscing on the days when he had all the power. That’s it. I don’t know, maybe there are meant to be some parallels between fiction and real-life, but Coldplay were still very much “on top” at the time, so… I’m at a loss. I’ve only ever been able to take it at face value. And there’s all the religious imagery in there for good measure. If you really wanted to know what’s going on, there’s always Wikipedia. I guess I could go into some parts of the music. Wouldn’t be the same otherwise. The band instruments don’t do a lot. Will Champion strikes a bell during the choruses, he really exaggerates the arm movements when you see him do it live. There’s that small guitar “solo” after the first chorus. Really, I think all the highlights of the song come in the vocals. Martin’s lead I’ve already noted. But you’ve got to like those group “Oh-oh-oh-oh-ohhhhhhh-oh” vocals that come in before the last chorus to add that soaring quality. And then there are those other harmonising vocals that close the song out and also appear underneath the “Just a puppet on a lonely string” lyric earlier, and they fade out just as the beginning of ‘Violet Hill’ sneaks right at the last second. It’s a cool transition. I did always think it was neat that the big singles from the album were in the album’s second half, bonded together in the way they were. Turns out this will be the last ever Coldplay post here. If it was to end on any post, I’m glad it’s on this. This era of the band was them at their most interesting in my eyes, and a lot of good songs came out of it. ‘Viva la Vida’ was the title track behind it all. Well, at least one of them.

#1465: Manic Street Preachers – Virginia State Epileptic Colony

Leave a reply

In early 2014, the only song I had in my iTunes library from Manic Street Preachers’ 2009 album, Journal for Plague Lovers, was ‘Jackie Collins Existential Question Time’. There was no official single from the LP, but that song was chosen as the main promotional cut from it, getting its own music video and stuff. I was in my first year of uni. I was hosting a radio station. Needed more songs to fill out a playlist. ‘Jackie Collins…’ was sitting there, all alone in my personal library, so I thought there’d be no harm in downloading the other album tracks. I knew the context around it, being made up of songs with lyrics by original bandmember Richey Edwards before his disappearance in ’95. It had a 7.8 rating on Pitchfork when it wasn’t all Condé Nast-ed. It felt like it had the potential to be a very interesting listen. I went through the album from front to back on 12th February 2014. Out of the other 12 tracks I got to know through hearing it, it was the second-last one, ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’, that became a favourite of mine I think almost instantly. I repeated it a lot that year.

I do remember wondering if it was actually James Dean Bradfield singing on it. Of course it was, ’cause who else would it be? But when it got to the choruses where he elongates “Piggyyyy” and “VSECeeee”, I thought there was a grit on his vocal that otherwise hadn’t been on the rest of the album. Sounded like it was recorded in a totally different place. Once I realised that I liked the whole album and found the “Making of” documentary, I was bummed to see that every respective song contained footage of the band working on it in the studio except ‘Virginia State…’ which was put in place as the credits music. With that being the case, I’ve got in my head canon that the track was probably the last one recorded for the album and maybe very quickly too. Whatever the circumstances, this is one Manic Street Preachers song that I could honestly leave on repeat for about half an hour without getting tired of it. The song goes by so briskly, its structure very easy to follow, with so many melodic components included. The guitar riff that alternates between the open chords and the rising/descending guitar scale in the introduction, very catchy. James Dean Bradfield’s vocals, again, very melodic and memorable from start to finish. The only nitpick I would have is how he really tries to rhyme “half-circled light” with “potassium percolate”. It’s quite awkward. But those are the lyrics he had to work with. Sean Moore’s drumming is solid as a rock. Nicky Wire on bass guitar follows the root note, mainly. But he does provide the skipping piano line during the instrumental break, and that’s probably the most delightful part of the entire track.

The song’s title isn’t a phrase Richey Edwards invented. It’s in fact based on the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, a state-run institution holding patients with severe mental impairment and others who were considered to be “feeble-minded.” An outdated term. There’s a whole Wikipedia article on it. At some point, Edwards did his own research on the institution, got some lyrics down and passed them on to his friends/bandmembers before he was never to be seen again. The lyrics detail the “choices” on offer to the inhabitants within the institution, but then, it’s like they don’t have much choice considering their mental states. Whatever they’re handed is really their only option. All very sarcastic, which Edwards could very much be in his lyricism. I mean, if you want to hear an official statement on the song’s meaning/background from the band, there’s no better video than the track-by-track analysis they did for NME. That is a video that’s come in handy for all the …Plague Lovers songs I’ve written about on the blog. How many songs by Manic Street Preachers are on here, ten or something? There are so much more by the band I like now. I always had respect for them ’cause they made The Holy Bible and Everything Must Go. But in June, I went through the entirety of their discography, inspired by the What Is Music? podcast. It was time well spent. I’d recommend anyone do the same.

#1464: Coldplay – Violet Hill

1 Reply

Eighteen years can go by just like that, apparently. It was 2008 that Coldplay released Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. I was 13, a full functioning human being. A naïve one, but existing nonetheless. I was aware of my surroundings and knew my right from wrong. And I remember, very clearly, ‘Violet Hill’ being the new video, the new single by the band as if it were a couple weeks ago. When I saw/heard the tune, I was into it from the jump. The song, I think, is still the coolest one the band have ever done. If there was a contest for coolest Coldplay song, ‘Violet Hill’ should win it hands down. I was pretty conscious for the X&Y era. ‘Speed of Sound’, ‘Fix You’, ‘The Hardest Part’, although I have no kind of beef with those tunes, you could say they’re very stereotypically Coldplay. No one but Coldplay could have written and performed those songs. What struck me about ‘Violet Hill’ those first times hearing it was how un-Coldplay it sounded. Even today, it can sometimes surprise me that it’s Coldplay I’m listening to when ‘Violet Hill’ gets to playing in the shuffled playlist. It’s almost experimental by their standards. It was the first Coldplay song that got me excited for an upcoming release of theirs.

I’m trying to think if there’s another song of Coldplay’s that I consider better than ‘Violet Hill’, and I’ve gotta say, I don’t think there is a song by them that I personally enjoy more. I kind of like everything about it. Except for that “My nerves are poles that unfroze” lyric. The phrasing always felt a little strange to me. Is ‘unfroze’ a word used on a regular basis? I don’t know. Other than that, I think Chris Martin’s never sounded better vocal-wise. Just the tone of it. Maybe it’s the microphone he was using, the production, the studio he was in. Whatever it was, it helped. The “ba-dam ba-dam” guitar riff that happens during the verses are very cool. “Jagged” is the word used on Wikipedia under the song’s composition section. A very suitable adjective. It applies to the solo too. A bit repetitive, sure. But again, it’s the tone. Jon Buckland plays his guitar very differently to his usual style in the song. There are those wild guitar string bends going on in the back when Martin sings the “When the future’s architectured… / “Bury me in armour” parts of the verses. All adds to the drama. I think Guy Berryman’s bass line throughout is quite underrated too. He’s right in the pocket, and he does these little fills here and there which hit the spot. Then all the commotion’s swiped away to leave Martin singing the last section on his own with his piano. It’s all good, good stuff. And this album is where some people say Coldplay changed for the worse. Couldn’t be more wrong. The next album, though, we could have a conversation about.

So what’s it about? What’s it about? Well, obviously there’s a relationship situation going on within the song. “If you love me, won’t you let me know?” The chorus line sung in unison by the entire band with Martin’s going into falsetto for a brief moment in the centre. It’s great how he sings quite low in the verses that it feels like a climactic moment when he goes to a higher register for those choruses. And then, with the talk about ‘a carnival of idiots on show’, not wanting to be a soldier and a fox becoming God, well, that’s all a metaphor for the USA in the mid-2000s. George Bush Jr. in charge, no one taking him all that seriously. Where does a fox come into it? The fox is meant to be a reference to FOX News. So there you go. It’s anti-war, and it’s about looking at America, making a commentary on their society at the time and thinking, “What the hell is going on over there?” Some things never change. You don’t feel as if there’s a lot of hope left by the end of the song. It’s hearing it within the context of the album that I think elevates it that little more, ’cause ‘Strawberry Swing’ follows, arriving as the most optimistic song on there. That last leg of Viva… from the title track onwards, that’s a strong, strong run. So you may be able to guess, this won’t be the last song of the LP to be covered here.

#1463: Blur – Villa Rosie

Leave a reply

It seems 2016 was the year that I came to properly understood Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish. On the 3rd April that year, two days before I turned 21, I spent a couple hours in the afternoon going through its 2012 Special Edition issue. I already had this in my iTunes library, but the files all had a volume normalisation thing going on, so all the songs sounded equally quiet with a lot of loss in the dynamics. Must have initially downloaded it from the wrong kinds of places. But with that normalisation turned off on Spotify, a big difference was noticeable. Before that “new” listen, I was only into a few songs like ‘Chemical World’, ‘Star Shaped’… ‘Sunday Sunday’. But in this new light, ‘Pressure on Julian’ sounded brilliant – and it’s a great song you naysayers, the production of ‘Miss America’ felt like a huge pillow I could sink into, ‘Oily Water’ was cosmic, mind-warping. Each deep cut could get their own re-evaluation. But the one song that grew highest in my estimation was the 11th track, ‘Villa Rosie’. What I used to flimsily disregard as a passing song that was near the album’s end became one that, in my eyes, probably could have been a single in its time. The track was repeated on several separate occasions throughout 2016, it was my new favourite song for a while.

But why? “Why?” You’re asking. Damn, I don’t want to do a whole step-by-step of each section of the song. But I like the climbing build-up of the intro that falls into the slamming chords and incessant thrashing of cymbals, which then transitions into one of Graham Coxon’s most unique guitar riffs.. A “perverso riff”, in his own words. You watch that clip I’ve just linked and see how his fingers move over the fretboard to gets those licks off and carry out the chord progressions. It looks almost unnatural. The riff shouldn’t work, but it does in context of the song, and very well too, I should add. The “OOH-HOO” vocals that the riff then climaxes with, they’re a little funny, a little obnoxious even, but I like ’em, I think those are the feelings they’re going for, anyway. While Damon Albarn’s singing the verses, you can hear what seems to be a vocal overdub of him whispering the lyrics over the top. Sometimes it’s all I can focus on. I guess it’s meant to add a sense of mystique or something. And the verses then lead into what might be one of Blur’s most under-the-radar singalong choruses that they’ve ever put to tape, with harmonies all over the shop. There’s that little “ding-dong” that occurs after each “Ooh-hoo” in the short break following the second chorus. Coxon’s guitar solo brings everything home. The way the track ends with the sudden stop and the slow picking of the last chord… Man, this is such a tune. And you won’t find any footage of a young Blur playing it live, because they never did until they started to in 2023, the weirdos.

If you want to know what the song’s about, look no further than this link. Might have to scroll your way down or ‘Ctrl + F ‘Villa Rosie’, depending on how you like to surf the net. But if you’re feeling lazy, ‘Villa Rosie’ is about a fictional ‘watering hole / drinking den’ of the same name where the lads – not the members of Blur, just in general – go to shoot the shit after work. Don’t even really think I have to analyse the lyrics all that much, you get the idea of what’s going on. I think the most telling line in the whole song is ‘All losers come to Villa Rosie every night’, because up to that point I get the feeling that Villa Rosie is the place to be by the way Albarn implores listeners to ‘form a queue’ there, saying how it promises ‘a sweeter life’ – which for the longest time I thought was ‘a sweet delight’, I kind of like that better. So really, it’s a bit of a commentary on the types of people who go to those types of people who go to those kinds of gentlemen’s clubs who Albarn apparently holds a little disdain for. Nevertheless, it’s a lot of fun to be had while listening to the song. Just the general upbeat nature of it and all those little musical nuggets in between for the ears to latch on to. Modern Life…, it’s my favourite of the three “Life” albums by Blur in that Britpop era, and ‘Villa Rosie’ is one of the biggest reasons for that preference.

#1462: Arctic Monkeys – The View from the Afternoon

Leave a reply

You might not be able to believe that this will be the first time I’ve covered a song from Arctic Monkeys’ debut album. I’ve written about ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’ and ‘From the Ritz to the Rubble’ in the past, but those were both concerning the versions on the Five Minutes with Arctic Monkeys EP. Not saying that I’m an OG fan who was downloading songs from MySpace back in the day, but I did hear those Beneath the Boardwalk demos before Whatever People… was released in January 2006. And when the album arrived, a lot of the songs, to me, were just sanitised versions of them. The edge that was once there had now been taken out. A roundabout way of saying I liked the demos more. I’ve always liked the live take they did for the ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ music video more than how the studio take came out too. It somehow felt too produced, which is funny ’cause the album’s obviously the least produced out of all the work they’ve done.

‘The View from the Afternoon’ wasn’t on that collection of demos, though. I heard the song first via its music video, which was on repeat on MTV2 in 2006 because it was the new one by the Arctic Monkeys. The track was originally going to be the third single from Whatever People…, but the band had announced the Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? EP just two months after the album’s release. ‘The View…’ was to be included as the leading track on that EP, so the video was made to prepare the people for that rather than what would be an A-side and maybe a couple B-sides. In the video, a young man plays the drums to the song in the middle of a council estate from what looks like morning to night, his hands bleeding in the process, until he’s eventually knocked out by a guy with a baseball bat. We don’t see the impact, but you can see that’s what’s about to happen. This video made me really want to get into playing the drums. Because I also saw the visual first, I didn’t know how the song properly ended until my sister borrowed a copy of Whatever People… from a school friend of hers, ’cause the song cuts out just as the baseball bat’s about to hit the kid’s head. It’s a very nice chord the song ends on, gotta say.

The whole theme of the album is a night out in Sheffield, from perspectives of the people involved to the outsiders looking in at all the chaos. ‘The View from the Afternoon’ is exactly what it’s about in the title. It’s about the people looking forward to the night out, thinking about the endless possibilities a few hours before everything kicks off. The track opens with the line “Anticipation has a habit to set you up for disappointment,” which everyone comments on how clever it is that Alex Turner’s also referencing the hype around the ban. That isn’t the entire lyric, though, so is he really? He probably is. I sometimes thought people were reading too much into it. But yeah, Turner writes from the point of view of someone listing the things they want to see while out on the town. Girls in fancy dress, gambling in the fruit machine, the works. A particular action that’s focused upon in the lyrics is drunk texting a girl you’re interested in, which the band urge the narrator to bear in mind. We have a strong album opener on our hands. The four bandmembers are firing on all cylinders. Maybe there’s a reason why the music video places a focus on the drumming, because Matt Helders is going crazy on ’em. Lot of sixteenths on the hi-hats and frenetic drum fills. Turner and Jamie Cook play very quickly on their guitars, their highlight probably being the part where the song dies down and the two of them play alternating chords that switch from left to right and back again in the headphones. Former bass guitarist Andy Nicholson follows the chord progression of the rhythm guitar, but he does it very well, rounds off that low end. So maybe Whatever People… isn’t my favourite Arctic Monkeys album, but I can’t say it doesn’t get off to a good start.