Coldplay Blows MTV's Mind

Pardon our lateness to the Coldplay listening party.

By now I'm sure you know the narrative: Coldplay dabbles in Radiohead/NIN online altruism by making the the first single from their upcoming Brian Eno-produced album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends available for download (upon surrendering your email address) from their official site yesterday. And yet, by the time our morbid curiosity got the best of us, it took three different email submissions before we finally got the goods.

And that anecdote is about as exciting as it gets. Granted, we've never been huge Coldplay fans, but who could possibly mistake "Violet Hill" as a dynamic and interesting song? MTV!

And seeing as their gushing "review" of "Violet Hill" is far more engrossing than the actual song, let's train our curmudgeonly glare upon it instead. Thanks to this piece, historians will one day be able to pinpoint the exact time and date when music journalism died: April 28, 2008 at 4;47 pm EDT. It was at that moment that this review appeared online and actually pleaded with MTV readers to read a - gasp - written assessment of music instead of just listening to it...the horror!!!

And no, we haven't swung some sort of streaming deal with Capitol Records. Rather, this is a written preview of the track[...]And while we realize that reading about a song doesn't compare to actually hearing it, what else are you gonna do for the next 15-odd hours?

So very sad. And after apologizing to their readers for...making them read, our besotted MTV scribe then attempts to describe the revolutionary song structure of "Violet Hill"; and there doesn't seem to be enough words in the English language to talk about a song that starts quietly, gets loud, and then ends quietly. But at least MTV tries, detailing the "wall of gauzy, all-encompassing white noise" before the "breakneck shifts" or "sudden shifts from spacey to stomping" that cue "some of Queen's most garish moments" and a "curling solo", all of which "is strongly indicative of the breadth of song structures you'll hear on the Brian Eno-produced album".

I honestly couldn't pick this song out of a police lineup based on that description. Really, "Violet Hill" is about as dynamic as the Subway "Five Dollar Footlong" jingle. So much for the goodwill we thought MTV built based on yesterday's I Want My MTV.

But of course, don't take our word for it, and PLEASE don't take MTV's word; go HERE and judge for yourself.