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’.

I am sitting outside in gallery of my room, sipping iced tea and listening to Batatyachi Chawl by P. L. Deshpande… Easily the best moment in whole month. The lightning is romantic, energetic and it feels soothing at the same time (It was 43 degree Celsius in the afternoon). I just put on some music. Kenny G… Signing off in anticipation of rain…

Update1.0: It IS raining. Too bad I can’t go running on the road singin’ in the rain. It’s 3am and people are sleeping. Not that I care. Anyway, I am off.

Update2.0: And it continues. Been 10 minutes and the gallery is all wet… even with a parapet. It’s bizarre. It didn’t look like it would rain for a week in the morning and this sudden outburst is a bliss… It feels so great. I am excited.

Update3.0: Breathtaking. I cannot explain the surroundings right now (though it may have more to do with the darkness at 0330 hours than the state of my mind to be honest). My friend (neighbor) is awake and we are chatting in loud noise with each other. I am now enjoying a hot lemon tea. Too bad I don’t have any bhajis to go along as Nikhil suggested…

Update4.0: This is actually a nice time to try out some new coffee recipes. I think I just heard lightning strike ground somewhere. Hailstones now and it would be a perfect night – well, almost perfect. Enough of updates now, this time, signing off for sure. Adiós.

The movie starts off with a bang. I was actually intrigued at the beginning and was eager to know what would come next. Karthik, a troubled young mag, working in a construction company does not exist. Figuratively I mean. No one knows him, no one bothers him, he is shy and total chicken. Then… Karthk starts receiving calls from Karthik. The concept itself is amusing. Is there a souble role? Is Karthik suffering from multiple personality disorder? Does he have an evil twin somewhere? Did Karthik lock the twin up?

Point is, there are not many explanation a viewer can think in his/her mind about the movie. Once you figure out that only these 3-4 possibilities remain, you (I) lose interest in the movie. Of course, there can be other plausible ways to explain the stuff happening in the movie, but the story lacks that element of surprise. It’s too predictable for my liking. There is little (or absolutely zero) surprise at the end. Only one good thing that they throw in is totally irrelevant to the ‘calling’ concept.

Till the intermission, the movie totally rocks. No giveaways and no sneak peaks at the end. Had they concluded a movie to an open conclusion by terminating it at the intermission, I am sure lot of people would have appreciated the movie much more.

Coming back to the storyline of the movie, Karthik now starts receiving calls from someone. The caller is helping Karthik gain his confidence. The thing continues for some time. Then Karthik goes to Kerala. Now, the movie has already fallen apart to pieces, otherwise this… erm.. twist would have been a nice welcome.  And then the end. Without giving away the spoilers, the end is pathetic. Why is Karthik even there at the end? if they would have just killed him, it would have been much much better movie. Alas! this happy ending spree has left bollywood paralyzed. Sucks…

Now the positives, songs are good. Songs are really good considering how bad the movie is. Dialogs totally rock. The spontaneous humor, cheesy one liners combined with the modulation of voice by Farhan Akhtar… Too good. Both actors have done a fine job. Their on-screen gelling is brilliant (gelling ~ chemistry for those who don’t know. I am just bored of the word chemistry). They lit up a spark and 90% of my friends seem to like the movie only cause they get to see Deepika’s open back (which, I assure you, is not worth watching the movie for 2.5 hours). All the supporting cast and crew have done a splendid job as well. Only the actors have something for us to watch.

Please ignore any mistakes you find in the text. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself who reads and enjoys the posts that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it

Overall Rating: 2/5.

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 )