One of the most successful bands of our time, Coldplay, released their fifth studio album Mylo Xyloto today. The album has already surpassed Adele’s 21 and is now the most pre-ordered album of this year. Critics, some of them, are calling this their best album ever and some say that Coldplay is losing grip on who they are and what they want to be. Regardless of these opinions, I am hooked to the album with over 100 plays in less than a day.

Coldplay lead vocalist, Chris Martin said in 2002 that all he wants to do is make the best music with his best friends. 9 years down the line, Coldplay is one of the biggest hits of the century and Martin, prior to release of MX said – at the very least, the part about friends is still true. He’s being modest here when you see the success they’ve had over the years.

This album, according to him, is an attempt to sway the audience from their belief. A lot of people have made their mind, he said, about us and we would like to start from scratch. That’s exactly what they have done. They call it the clean slate. The album is full of surprises, songs with a woo-hooo instead of lyrics, their most electronic album to date also features ballads, slow sad songs and those end up being the hilights of the album. It’s irresistible.

Martin told MTV,

“It’s definitely a schizophrenic album … it keeps changing sounds,” he said. “That’s why we called it such a strange thing, Mylo Xyloto. Because we felt like so many people have already made up their minds about us, both good and bad, that we can sort of start again from scratch and try and reflect all the music we listen to and we love.”

Track List

The US version of the album features 14 songs with three of them being instrumental and less than a minute long.

When asked about the album tour, Martin apparently said something one the lines of – you cannot take these things for granted. If the album turns out to be a bomb, we may have to open a cake shop. Mylo Xyloto is a love story with a happy ending. The single Paradise was released last month and is available on youtube on Coldplay channel.

When you consider that the last album Coldplay released was in 2008, almost 3 years ago, this enormous response is the true complement the fans can give this band. With their emotional songs, themes of love and the willingness to push all the boundaries to keep producing different things, Coldplay remains my favorite band. My favorite song? Almost all of them but currently I am hooked to ‘Hurts like heaven’.

Last.fm

Have you ever been so bored of listening to the same music again and again that you planned to secretly start a band and compose your own music and launch an album? Okay, that’s a little extreme I agree, but listening to the same music gets boring more often than not for me. Except in case of classics of course.

This was of course before the time I created an account on Last.fm. Last.fm is a UK based Internet radio system. We are not interested in the radio part for this article. Here, I will review the Audioscrobbler of Last.fm. It’s a service which resides on your system and caches the tracks you listen to (that is of course if you tag and organize your music, which I do). When you are connected to the Internet, the program transfers the stats to your Last.fm account. Then, based on the tracks you listen a lot and don’t listen much (or never listen to), your radio listening habits and stats gathered from your portable devices (like the iPhone), the service recommends new music for you. It also builds a relationship between users giving an information about the similar artists the users like and offers many other social networking features.

Recommendations are calculated using a collaborative filtering algorithm so users can browse and listen to 30 second previews of a list of artists which are recommended. The page also lists music that has been directly recommended to the user by peers and music from the groups the user belongs to, journals written by other users about some artists the user listens to, and other users who have listened to similar music recently. Last.fm also allows users to manually recommend specific artists, songs or albums to other users on their friends list or groups they belong to.

I have found numerous new music tracks and albums via this way and the recommendation of Poets of the Fall in particular has stuck like nothing else. So, if you are, like me, bored with the same music, head over to Last.fm, create an account and start scrobbling… (don’t forget to add me as a friend )