First Listen: Brand New Coldplay Single

 “I don’t think we’ll top this,” Chris Martin famously declared before the release of Coldplay’s ‘X&Y’ in 2005. Well, at 12.15pm today, his band made the first single from their upcoming fourth album ‘Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends’ available to download for free at www.coldplay.com.

Importing the track into iTunes gives a sneak preview of the album artwork, which sees Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 painting ‘Liberty Leading The People’ defaced with the graffiti ‘Viva La Vida’, meaning ‘Live The Life’. A bit confusing, what with one being very very French and the other being a Spanish phrase, but we’ll forgive them the culture clash…

After an initial 40 seconds of an eerie, swirling, Vangelis-like soundscape (clearly the influence of producer Brian Eno has left its mark), Chris’s vocals commence over a gentle piano, “Was a long and dark December/From the rooftops I remember/There was snow/White snow”, before a menacing, crunchy guitar lick ambushes him and ‘Violet Hill’ thumps into life, sporting a massive-sounding kick-drum and meaty bass.

From here on in, ‘Violet Hill’ is as enormous as X&Y’s centrepiece ‘Fix You’. It sounds BIG, THUMPY and EXCITING. With Chris’s searing chorus refrain of “If you love me, won’t you let me know?” wedging itself slap bang in the middle of your brain before the song has even reached halfway. Then comes a guitar solo from Jonny Buckland that has been produced to sound like it might have been half-inched from a slowed-down Phil Collins record. Not that that’s a sleight, mind, but this is a long way from the searing simplicity of ‘Everything’s Not Lost’. Coldplay have evolved even from ‘X&Y’.

As the swell of another huge chorus dies off, we’re back where we came in, with just a tender piano and Chris’s vocals to guide us softly out…

“I took my love down to Violet Hill/There we sat in the snow/All that time she was silent still/So if you love me, won’t you let me know?/If you love me, won’t you let me know?”

Although we’ve not heard the rest of record, on the evidence of ‘Violet Hill’ it seems that working with U2 collaborator and electronica legend Brian Eno might have elevated Coldplay even further into the pantheon of musical majesty. Or at least, they’ve have a bloody good go at topping ‘X&Y’… We’ll see…