Best Of 2008 (#1)

And the winner is...

1. Coldplay - Viva La Vida

The long expected fourth album does not disappoint on any level. If they'd put their new Life In Technicolor II in at some point, this album would have shot over 10/10. (It's that good!)

Life In Technicolor opens the album, an instrumental which really works, seguing into Cemeteries Of London, a slow starting song that really gets going. Lost! is fantastic - the drumming is powerful and the vocals work perfectly.

42 is an interesting song - slow start, then a guitar part, then some singing, more guitar, and a closing slow part again. Abandoning a typical song layout works well here. Lovers In Japan, the first part of the fifth track, is fast-paced and brilliant. The second half of the fifth track, Reign Of Love, is a slow piano song. I don't understand why these two were put in one track - maybe piano similarities?

Anyway. Yes, the sixth track, is fantastic, and features Chris Martin singing a lot deeper than usual. The randomly hidden track, Chinese Sleep Chant, sounds unusually heavy for Coldplay, but is still insanely good.

Then comes the best song of all time. Viva La Vida. Well-deserving of its number ones all over the world, the violins and mixture of instruments combine to make this song absolutely outstanding. Violet Hill isn't as good, but still is the second best on the album. Its guitar solo really is un-Coldplay, but nevertheless works fantastically. Maybe the half-a-minute intro wasn't entirely necessary, but builds it up well.

Strawberry Swing is about blue skies and all that stuff. It's my least favourite, but it's still good.

Death And All His Friends concludes the album (not counting The Escapist, the hidden track) with a truly Coldplay-sounding song. I swear I've heard some of that guitar sound on an older Coldplay track. Oh well, it's still brilliant. The Escapist follows up straight after, and is just a version of Life In Technicolor, with the first thirty seconds of the opener repeated over and over, with some words.

Generally - amazing. If only they'd put a huge version of Life In Technicolor with The Escapist, Life In Technicolor and Life In Technicolor II at the end, because that would have been absolutely jaw-dropping.

SCORE: 10/10 (edited from 11/10 because that's nonsense :) )