"You Know How I Know You're Gay?"

There's a new Coldplay song out.  Other than a weird guitar riff that sounds like it was lifted off a club track, it kinda sounds like Peter Gabriel's popular late 80s material (Salisbury Hill, In Your Eyes). Coldplay is kind of an odd band.  For a while there they looked like they were going to become huge, but they ended up settling back into being just "big".  There's always a bit of difficulty in projecting exactly what any huge UK artist is going to do when they cross the pond - Oasis certainly had a good career here, but not at the level of "bigger than the Beatles" like they claimed in England, and Robbie Williams was one of many failures in America.  Biffy Clyro seems to be the Brit band that's getting that push here, but I'm still waiting to hear radio play of any song other than Many of Horror (which still makes no sense to me as 3 words in a row like that). Back to Coldplay.  I couldn't stand them at first - Yellow is one of those grating, let me strangle the singer songs that belongs in the same dustbin in Hell with songs like James Blunt's Beautiful and Daniel Powter's Bad Day.  What an awful slice of music history that grouping was.  Then they released a bunch of songs that all kind of sound the same - Clocks (which has a cool mariachi remix if you can find it, they played it at my cousin's wedding), Fix You, The Scientist, Speed of Sound, In My Place.  I really can't even tell the last three apart. It was during this time, of course, that The 40 Year Old Virgin came out, leading to the title of this post.  I'm not sure how much that had to do with them never being supermegastars, but it probably didn't damage them as much as Stewart's shirt on Beavis and Butthead damaged any respect anyone had for Winger (seriously, if that shirt had said Slaughter or Firehouse or something, would we feel differently about Winger?). Their last album actually had some good music.  From what I remember of music news at the time, they were trying to become transcendant with it, using Viva La Vida as the driver.  I actually heard Violet Hill first, and liked it better.  They also had that Lovers in Japan song which kinda sucked, and Lost which had a nice guitar.  Anyway, this stuff was pretty big a few years ago, but didn't stand up (all the Amazin' Crazy Cryin' Amazin' songs I listed above still get radio play, these don't).  I haven't heard any ridiculous pronouncements from Chris Martin (I guess he leaves that up to Gwyneth anymore) so hopefully they've given up their delusions of grandeur and just gone back to trying to write music.  That's how it should be - as long as they don't make another song that sounds like Yellow.