More predictable than a summer heatwave is the critical backlash that comes when the next big thing releases something new once it has become, simply, a big thing. Exhibit A: Coldplay, whose latest disc, X&Y, is facing a critical drubbing. Jon Pareles* with the New York Times says Coldplay is "the most insufferable band of the decade," while the normally vitriolic Pitchfork.com seems so unmoved by the disc that it can only sigh, "They've almost certainly become the easiest band on the planet to be completely indifferent to" on the way to giving a 4.9/10 review.

The thing is, though they and others overstate it, the reviews are at least partly right -- this is a fairly boring album. Much has been made about Coldplay being the new U2, and the band clearly bought into that storyline. It held back the record -- originally scheduled for a late winter/early spring release -- to work on it some more, and in the process seems to have sucked what little life there was clean out of it. If a room of engineers was charged with creating a Coldplay disc solely by calculating what it would sound like based on the band's previous two discs, they'd probably at least err on the side of offering a compelling hook or two, let alone a decent lyrical couplet. In doing so, they would have been overly optimistic.

I'll leave the note-by-note critical pile-on to others who get paid to do so and just leave you with this: What happens now? If the masses really see through this and word of mouth leaves most of the band's fan base happy to download a couple of tracks and move on, how does the band recover? The way the music biz works these days, it'll be 2007 before there are even rumors of a new Coldplay disc, and it'll be 2008 before they get something out (assuming there still are CDs then). They have no chance to regroup, locked into a world tour that will keep them on the road through the end of the year and beyond, I'm sure. Look what happened to U2 after it released the execrable Pop -- that came four years after the experimental Zooropa and six after the hit Achtung, Baby. Between that 1991 disc and the band's next decent (and decent-selling) disc, nine years elapsed. And that came after what amounted to an artistic retrenchment.

So, by buying into the myth-making machine (giving the band credit for being able to choose commerce over art... the jury's still out on that one), Coldplay may find itself playing halftime at Super Bowl XXXVI (that's about six down the road, folks) to promote it's new record, which will probably sound an awful lot like "Yellow." Then again, let's be honest: X&Y will probably be a huge hit, the band will become even more massive and it will still be playing that Super Bowl show, only this time it will be to promote a double-disc greatest hits package.

*By the way, Pareles gets it wrong in his review, which offers a litany of post-Radiohead pretenders as a way to infer that even at their best, Coldplay et al are pale imitations. "Particularly in its native England, Coldplay has spawned a generation of one-word bands - Athlete, Embrace, Keane, Starsailor, Travis and Aqualung among them - that are more than eager to follow through on Coldplay's tremulous, ringing anthems of insecurity," he writes. Not so fast. Travis hit the scene in 1997, and it's most obvious foray into post-Radiohead quiet/loud dynamics was 1999's The Man Who, which predates Coldplay's Parachutes by a year. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that Radiohead's The Bends begat Travis who begat Coldplay who begat Starsailor who... cares?