"Lifestyle Music"

That's how Thom Yorke of Radiohead once referred to Coldplay's music. Cuts twice as deep when you consider the fact that Chris Martin has publicly referred to Radiohead as a band Coldplay looks up to. I've listened to X&Y enough times now though that I'm starting to agree with old Thom. It's not a bad album necessarily, but it's certainly not a great one either. The songs occupy a sonic space somewhere between U2 and Radiohead (borrowing heavily from both bands along the way), but it's like anything dangerous or inventive that you might find in either of those bands' music has been pasteurized by the Coldplay filter. That sounds a little more harsh than I mean it to, because I think X&Y is mostly an album of growth for Coldplay, as they struggle to find how their sound works with their relatively new massive stardom. Several tracks on the disc, "Fix You" in particular, sound as if they were designed (not written, but created in a pop music lab or something) to become huge hits, and likely will. But overall, I think I'm disappointed by how harmless the whole album is. The only song that deviates from the Coldplay formula is the bonus track, "Till Kingdom Come", that was written for Johnny Cash. Ironically, it's one of my two favorite tracks, even though it seems like it was tacked on as an afterthought. Really, I wanted to hear the band try new things, and instead, it seems like they took fewer chances this time.

Now here's a rarity: an intelligent and crowd-pleasing idea from a TV executive. Somebody at Fox's DVD division finally got smart, and is releasing several collections of the X-Files mythology episodes. Now you can watch the conspiracy theories and all the Cigarette Smoking Man you can handle back-to-back, without having to wade through a lot of annoying (and let's face it, often pointless) standalone episodes. Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite X-Files were standalones (the episode with Luke Wilson as a sherriff in a town of vampires comes to mind), but all those full-season box sets seem like a huge time investment for a show that was kind of disappointing when it came to giving out answers. At least maybe this way I can watch fewer episodes and try to make some sense out of this whole thing before the next movie hits theaters.