Attention all suicidal businessmen! Attention all midlife crisisees! Put down that Athlete album, switch off that Zero CD! Why? Because the queens of faux beautiful, nay, insipid tunes, Coldplay, are back. Don’t cheer too loudly, you might scare them off. Its been almost three years since the release of the singles collection that was ‘A Rush Of Blood To The Head’, after which they set of on a tour to make the world teary eyed and sleepy.

Now they’re back with a whole new batch of heartfelt Radio 2 approved songs (basically Emo for Guardian readers), the first of which is ‘Speed of Sound’. Any foolish hopes that the new material would show some of the rawness and honesty of the first album are quashed about 0.0001 second into this single, as it’s highly polished and inoffensive keyboards creep in, quietly so as not to wake sleeping babies, before the song ‘kicks in’ with uninspiring drums and the odd piano line here and there (which sounds suspiciously like the Clocks piano riff but I guess if your boning Hollywood celebs your not going to have time to write new music) all as Chris Martin croons about birds and mountain and organic nappies like the new age hippy he is.

Apparently they have a guitarist but he hasn’t been spotted since their first Jo Whiley session. More news on him when we get it. I sense a Radio One conspiracy personally. For all the dreary, Dawson Creek-ness of it all, its still alright. Yes, it might be a very average song, but then Coldplay are a very average band (at least they’re not Keane, though you could argue that that was all Coldplay’s fault…and you’d be right). What they need is re-branding and re-imaging, something to give them that edge they lack.

First, we need to send Chris Martin to spend a month with Norwegian Death metallers: they’d soon get him grave robbing, burning down churches and filling himself with mass amounts of the best high class drugs. He’ll be throwing pigs’ heads at gigs in no time. Second, bring in redneck Zakk Wyldd (a man who makes the last pope look like the most understanding and open minded person to have ever worn a robe) and Kerry King to replace the big slab of nothing currently passing for a guitarist. They could rework ‘The Scientist’ into a trash metal, devil-worshipping anthem, renaming it ‘The Satanist’ instead. It would have 10 minutes guitar wank-a-thons, screamed vocals and everything. Lastly, get Cannibal Corpse to come up with track names; they’d releasing tracks such as ‘Human Brain Salad’ in no time. The world would better for it too.

Ali Safavi