COLDPLAY
Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends
(Capitol)
Available on CD, LP with bonus CD copy, iTunes and AmazonMP3.
A special edition with the Prospekts March EP added is also available. 

This one was a Vee recommendation. I never owned a Coldplay album until she encouraged me to check it out, and it wasn’t until I was in New York City this past August with Tara and we visited the Virgin Megastore in Times Square  that I said the heck with it and bought it. There’s a snarky review on Rate Your Music that treats this like it’s a u2 album, as if that’s a bad thing, and while Brian Eno sat in the producer’s chair for this album as he did for several U2 albums and there are a few moments that do sound like parts of Bono & Co.’s back catalog (the opening synths on “Live in Technicolor” recalling “Where The Streets Have No Name”), the album still sounds like Coldplay from start to finish. If you never owned a Coldplay album before, this album will make you a fan. 

As for why I waited a few weeks to grab the album? I wasn’t sure whether to buy the CD or the LP and didn’t know that Capitol, in a rare moment of clarity (I’m sure some of their former superstar artists [*cough*Paul McCartney, Radiohead, Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones*cough*] have a few nasty things to say about Capitol’s current owners), threw a bonus CD copy of the album into every LP copy.