"Don't Panic", the opening track of Coldplay's first album, drew its title from the famous motto of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels. Two albums later, it seems they chose the wrong Adams catchphrase; most of their recorded output is better exemplified by the Guide's description of Earth: "Mostly harmless." In their seven years together, Coldplay have risen to monumental levels of popularity on a potent mixture of nice-guy charm, serviceable songwriting, and general inoffensiveness. Unfortunately, these aren't the kind of traits that often lead to interesting music. Not that the band hasn't taken the occasional stabs at creativity and innovation; it's just that those attempts have always been carefully measured, or even nervously self-conscious.

Coldplay have never seemed intent on world domination, but as their early singles caught on, journalists came waving raves. Then, with nearly 5 million copies of Parachutes sold worldwide and their popularity on the upswing, the band's sophomore album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, found the band unsure of how to advance. Luckily for them, their decision to virtually recreate Parachutes on a larger budget paid off commercially: The album got them tagged as "the next U2," a ridiculously off-base coronation that ignores the fact that U2 recorded "I Will Follow", "New Year's Day", "Bad", and The Joshua Tree, among others, before they wandered off into the MOR wilderness.

Coldplay, meanwhile, started in the middle of the road and haven't strayed since. Granted, they've produced a handful of good songs-- "Don't Panic", "Shiver", and "The Scientist" are all fine achievements, while "Clocks" remains a great piano part in search of an equally great melody-- but their albums have yet to justify the critical hyperbole, and their third full-length, X&Y;, isn't going to be the one to lock that down. Though dressed to the nines in big guitars and faultless musicianship, X&Y; is unable to lay claim to even a single song equal to any of the high points from their first two albums, and the band's obvious desire to be all things to all people doesn't help: They long to be huge and expansive, in The Unforgettable Fire mode ("A Message"), tear-jerking AOR balladeers ("Fix You"), and hip, Kraftwerk-referencing aesthetes ("Talk"), but at heart, they're really built for easy listening, which makes their rockers feel cursory and their ballads simpering.

X&Y; is sequenced fast-song/slow-song through almost its entire running order, which means those of you uninterested in wading through doe-eyed love songs based on lazy rhyming couplets and trite resolutions have already lost half a disc's worth of music. You'll "go backwards and then/ You'll go forwards again." You'll "get lost and then get found." You'll notice that the first verse of "Swallowed in the Sea" ("You cut me down a tree/ And brought it back to me/ And that's what made me see/ Where I was coming from") is somehow meaningless, yet also cliched. Had Coldplay accompanied these lyrics with remotely interesting or memorable music, this could be somewhat overlooked; sadly, "Swallowed in the Sea" is one of several aggressively banal ballads that sink this album into a sort of neo-Carpenters abyss.

The more uptempo tracks here tend to be light years better than their leaden counterparts, if only because the louder accompaniment manages to drown out more of Chris Martin's lyrics and bring the focus to his pleasant if unspectacular vocals. Guitarist John Buckland does his part to bring life to the proceedings: He's an encyclopedia of Will Sergeant and Johnny Marr-isms, and even if most of his window dressings are little more than a distillation of tricks learned from better bands, he does a nice job of providing the illusion of a grand gesture for songs like "Square One" and "White Shadows". Martin's vocals, meanwhile, rarely command attention, content to melt into the string synthesizer and guitar reverb as if he hopes he's not imposing on you. Listening back to an earlier track like "Shiver" proves he's capable of more.

Lending to the uninspired nature is lead single "Speed of Sound"'s uncanny resemblance to "Clocks". Certainly, it rarely hurts to stick with what works, but this is not just a near-exact replica of its successful predecessor; it's also a less memorable song riding a piano hook that has so deeply infiltrated the pop-culture landscape that I've become numb to it. In fairness, the track's vocal melody outperforms the one from "Clocks" by a hair, but without a strong hook, the song fails in the one category it needs to succeed in: replay value. It's symptomatic of the rest of the album, and indeed, much of the band's catalog to date: Like Coldplay's two previous albums, only more so, X&Y; is bland but never offensive, listenable but not memorable. It may be pointless to hate them, but with this album, they've almost certainly become the easiest band on the planet to be completely indifferent to.

-Joe Tangari, June 07, 2005