This is possibly the finest collection of elevator music ever assembled onto one compact disc. After being pushed back by repeated delays in production, Coldplay finally delivered their long-awaited follow-up to A Rush of Blood to the Head. It's fairly obvious by the time "What If" wraps up that there's this album is lacking the passion of their previous two albums. And although they're able to catch little bits of momentum here and there--the one-two punch of "White Shadows" and "Fix You" try to get something going early on, but are overridden my mediocre melodies soon after. The problem with X&Y might have been something as simple high expectations from the public. They had reached a major high with their previous album, but rather than strive for something bigger and different, Coldplay instead takes one song and tries to stretch it out across an entire album. That song was "Clocks," the gigantic hit from their previous album. The "influence" of their best-selling adult contemporary hit is felt all over X&Y, with varying degrees of obviousness. The result is a whole slew of inoffensive, listenable, derivative songs that all bleed into each other like an amateur watercolor portrait. Only a couple of songs ever really take off, leaving the rest in a puddle of lush, mid-tempo ballads that are devoid of even the slightest risk. ...Still, when an album features a song as undeniably gut-punching as "Fix You," it's impossible to call that album terrible.
