Coldplay sticks to what we love, despite a few hiccups

Coldplay has always been a band that can take sound and make it anything they want it to be. They have found ways to take something brand new, mix it in with what they do best (the piano playing abilities and hypnotizing voice of Chris Martin and the perfectly timed guitar riffs from Johnny Buckland), and yet still produce something everyone recognizes as simply Coldplay. The same is true for their latest release, "Mylo Xyloto," although album number five is not without its flaws.

One thing I have always loved about Coldplay is when they design a song to get the listener/concert goer's feet tapping and heart beating, they end up doing even more than that. This album is full of those songs, like "Hurts Like Heaven," the already fairly popular singles "Paradise" and "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall," and a few others. They are songs that you just can't help but smile about, with Martin's anthemic vocals mixed with a variety of sounds that combine for an overall pleasant yet empowering sound to the ear.

It's those downtime songs that prevent this album from being better. Great examples of previous Coldplay tracks that would fit this description would be "The Scientist," "Trouble," or "The Hardest Part," and similar songs on "Mylo Xyloto" do not come close to matching up. Only one, "Us Against the World," is worth mentioning in the company of the great ballad-like Coldplay songs from albums past.

The other thing that really took this album down a grade for me was the song "Princess of China" featuring Rihanna. Aside from the fact the Barbadian good-girl-gone-bad mixes poorly with the rest of the band, the overall sound is so far off from anything else heard on the album. It seems so out of place, and that's hard to do given this is a band that uses a multitude of sounds in almost everything they do. I feel like this could have been saved as a bonus track or single that we would hear for a few weeks on the radio and then forget about.

It's around the time of "Princess of China" that the album just becomes slow; however, it quickly picks back up in colorful fashion. Soon, the song "A Hopeful Transmission" (perhaps named this as if to say the band are ‘hopeful' listeners haven't tuned out at this point) acts as an opening of the veil to shed more and more light. Then we hear the Coldplay we all know and love return for the last two songs of the album, which I, personally, cannot wait to see performed live.

Another thing I, unexpectedly, enjoyed on the album were songs like "A Hopeful Transmission" that simply serve as instrumentals to get from one point to another. The opening title-track even does this. These 30 to 40 second songs serve as a sort of pivot point as Coldplay moves seamlessly from one sound to another.

This is another great album from a fantastic band that fans will undoubtedly enjoy. The problems only arise when the band strays from the path of rhythmic guitar riffs complimenting pianos and synthesizers. The slower songs are far from the best, but when mixed in with the fantastic sounds we have grown to love, they do enough to make "Mylo Xyloto" an enjoyable experience.