The Who were immense if people are too stupid to notice that then the fault lies with them and not a lack of great ballads.

The Flying Burrito Brothers' virtuoso guitarist "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow also had a Hollywood career working in visual effects, working on (amongst many other things) the stop-motion animation sequences of the original Terminator  endoskeleton in 1984.

(My useless fact of the day already, and it's only 6.29am).

Love how they weave so many different samples together on this track.

A New Decade was my favourite Verve song for about three minutes, and then This is Music immediately overtook it Now, it would probably be The Sun the Sea, History, Slide Away or Star Sail. Bittersweet Symphony ain't bad either.

Is it wrong to like Licensed To Ill more than Paul's Boutique?

Really enjoying A Storm in Heaven. Shoegaze classic, sits very nicely with Nowhere and Loveless. If Ride conjures up the image of crashing waves, and MBV dreamworld chaos, then the Verve captures soaring through the limitless sky. You kinda have to wonder what happened when they got to the mainstream Urban Hymns, Coldplay regression into pop before Coldplay? Wtf??

I also wish that every song on ASIH was 10 minutes instead of 5.

Enjoying going through Bowie's back catalogue. Found this on Youtube today: Best of Bowie 1964-1968.

Bowie the Mod? Great stuff here!




Just goes to show, there's so much to Bowie, even before he became such a big figure.

I've re-discovered X&Y in the last couple of months,as overproduced and unnecessarily long as it might sound,there are some great tunes on there
Fix You and Speed Of Sound are the obvious ones,but I also feel like The Hardest Part is kinda overlooked and doesn't deserve the slack it often gets (it's always been one of my favourite Coldplay tracks really),the same goes for What If?
Talk is good,I absolutely love White Shadows (the bridge is average I have to say,but the verse and chorus are great) and it's a travesty that Til Kingdom Come only made it on the deluxe version

X&Y could have been good with a less bloated production and tracklist. I might have said this before, but A Rush of Blood to the Head sounds like a young, confident band daring to strike out at the title of "The Biggest Band in the World" and X&Y sounds like the tired kings trying formulaically to hold on to their crowns. Take the echo, reverb and synths away and use this tracklist:

1. Square One
2. White Shadows
3. Fix You
4. Talk
5. Speed of Sound
6. A Message
7. The Hardest Part
8. Low
9. Gravity
10. Til Kingdom Come

And it would have been a very solid third album. 

I'll have to admit, it did take me a while to appreciate it. It was the Roses going experimental and that drum loop is mental. Second Coming era is really under-appreciated because it doesn't sound like their debut or madchester tunes. 

Here's the same drum loop from Begging You slowed down, becoming the hypnotic instrumental known as "Moses" (no not the Coldplay tune!  )

X&Y is a great album marred by a few generic songs and flat production. This is probably a result of Chris Martin's absolute perfectionism during the recording sessions; the band has said in interviews that X&Y was their third attempt at their follow up to AROBTTH, and that they discarded over 42 songs. In addition, they made a major mistake by firing their producer, Ken Nelson, and asking their engineer, Danton Supple, to produce the rest of the album. Though I'm sure Supple did his best to create a great record, if you compare the tracks Nelson produced (White Shadows, Fix You, Twisted Logic, Till Kingdom Come, Proof, The World Turned Upside Down, Gravity) to those that Supple produced (everything else), it's pretty clear that not only are the songs Nelson worked with better produced, they also comprise a lot of the stronger material of the era. I can't help but think that the reason Coldplay ditched Nelson was because of their perfectionist attitude, the need to create an album that could match AROBTTH, and Nelson thought that the initial sessions were already good enough. The lesson to be learned here is that if you spend too much time on an album, you may end up with a final product that is not as good as it should be. I guess that's why some records, like MG, are recorded quickly to capture a specific mindset which might change dramatically in the next few months.

That being said, I think that X&Y is a great album, regardless if it could have been better. There's no denying the album's strengths, namely Square One, White Shadows, Fix You, etc, and even the songs which have been singled out as weaker (What If, the title track, and Swallowed in the Sea) are still very enjoyable to me, and far from album filler. Like BHN, it is a bit bloated, and it failed to live up to the massive hype surrounding it, which is why I think many don't hold it in very high regard. It's still miles better than anything Coldplay have released in this decade. In fact the critical failure of X&Y (it was by no means a commercial failure) can be pinpointed in hindsight as the point when Chris and co. decided to move away from their alternative influences, in effect signaling the beginning of the end.

Few U2 thoughts (mainly about their most popular songs):

One has to be one of the best love songs ever penned.

Beautiful Day has an amazing opening line ("My heart is a bloom, shoots up from the stony ground.")

Vertigo gets a lot of shit, but I think it's a pretty awesome rocker of an album opener and lead single. The Spanish counting is a little ridiculous, and the guitars are a little simplistic, but I think that, and everything past the second run through the chorus, is part of what makes it really good.

If You Wear That Velvet Dress is one of the most chill songs I've ever heard that dives even deeper into the edgy sound that Pop has. Bono's delivery is also perfect.