![]() ![]() Viva La Vida turned out to be a rich, transitional release, borrowing from their most disparate core of influences. You’d be forgiven for thinking this might mold into a colossal mess, but they rolled with the more valuable parts of Eno’s advice. Justin Timberlake was on the brain, at least when it came to pure surface-level aesthetics. He was reading Victor Hugo, specifically Les Miserables. Instead, Martin and the band voyaged around to Spanish-speaking countries to record in churches, sort of a distant cousin to what their Canadian counterparts pulled off for 2007’s Neon Bible. The band was tentative in the years leading up to Viva, with reports circulating of an impending five-year hiatus while bassist Guy Berryman was off raising his baby daughter. ![]() ![]() And you’re too repetitive, and you use the same tricks too much, and big things aren’t necessarily good things, and you use the same sounds too much, and your lyrics are not good enough,” Martin claims Eno told them, during an interview with Rolling Stone just before the album was released. 1 single really swing for the fences with these sort of gestures, channeling Arcade Fire’s arena-rock aspirations to the mainstream and actually getting there - especially given the trajectory of popular rock after Viva.Īfter 2005’s secretly great X&Y landed with a thud in most critic’s circles, including a devastating pan from the New York Times, Martin had a chip on his shoulder and came to a crossroads: Do you go on making the same kind of records with diminishing returns, or do you ask Brian Eno for a change of pace? He chose the latter, and the initial prognosis was scathing. We haven’t seen another super-popular, multi-platinum rock record with a No. This is true to a degree, but it undersells what the album turned out to be, which is one of the last meaningful collisions of big indie and mainstream rock. Pepper’s - at least that’s how Viva La Vida was written about upon release, somewhat disparagingly. Viva La Vida fit snugly into that old narrative of the world’s biggest band almost really going for it, working with a producer and instruments outside of their comfort zone for some approximation of Achtung Baby or Kid A or Sgt. ![]()
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