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The Cure for the Common ColdplayThe band's surprising new album.

By Jonah WeinerUpdated Tuesday, June 17, 2008, at 7:18 AM ET

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If X&Y was a big, shiny hot-air machine, you can all but hear Coldplay dismantling it on Viva La Vida. There's a lively sense of disarray to the album, a splatter of different ideas and sounds that the band doesn't try to tidy up. There are Middle Eastern string breakdowns, Afropop guitar peals, a jaunty house-music pulse, and, on "Lost!," a massive, rattling hip-hop beat that runs beneath a church organ. Timbaland once gushed that he'd love nothing more than to work with Coldplay, and this track helps us imagine what it might have sounded like if he had.

But who needs Timbaland when you can afford Brian Eno, another paradigm-flipping producer whose services are in far shorter supply these days? Eno is responsible for introducing David Bowie to noise, Talking Heads to polyrhythms, and U2 to cosmic sweep. (Given this third achievement, you could say that X&Y was an unintentional parody of an Eno album, place-holding until the real thing came along.) He likes to evict bands from their comfort zones. The hypnotized jam session was his idea, as was frequent instrument swapping, all to shake the band free of ingrained habits.

There are songs here that only Eno could have produced. "Reign of Love" recalls U2 but reminds us that Bono and friends are great not just at cloud-parting bombast but quiet, sensuous ballads, too: A central piano arpeggio billows gently while little specks of guitar noise hum and tremble. Unlike your typical U2 ballad, though—and as with "Violet Hill"—there is no chorus or 11^th-hour climax. The song just goes on for a few minutes before ending as quietly as it began.

Throughout the album, Coldplay finds fresh ways to balance the majestic with the miniature—precisely what was missing from X&Y. Here, some credit is due to Eno's co-producer, Markus Dravs, fresh from his work on Arcade Fire's Neon Bible. That Montreal act, beloved by Martin and Bono alike, are masters of the ramshackle epic, and there's a similar sensation of give, clatter, and scrappiness to even the biggest songs here, from the ecstatic clapping during the final section of "42" to the unkempt piano jangle of "Lovers in Japan." Viva La Vida is an album full of happy jolts and surprises from a band no one has ever accused of being surprising. Some of the ideas don't quite congeal, but it's exciting to see a band this big put its scrap paper on display.

The lyrics, too, have changed. Whether imagining an apocalyptic snowfall in "Violet Hill" or the crumbling of a once-proud empire in the title track, Martin has mortality and grim twists of fate on the brain this time out. It's a darker Martin than we've seen—perhaps those haters who deride him as a whimpering kitten finally got to him. He still has a weakness for platitudes ("You might be a big fish in a little pond, doesn't mean you've won," he informs us helpfully on "Lost!") but offsets them with shadowy little vignettes throughout. It's exactly the move the band needed to make if they wanted to become—and not just sell like—heavyweights.

To be fair, radical change is relative, and with Coldplay, a little upheaval goes a long way. There are still frequent glimpses of Martin's old softie self, and his inner optimist ultimately wins out. At the end of "Yes," during a surprisingly tender guitar meltdown, two words are faintly intelligible: "Sleep satisfied." Bad news, James Blunt: Even at their most experimental, bedtime still belongs to Coldplay.