I just read Hot Press’ Irish exclusive review of Coldplay’s Prospekt’s March EP (Irish exclusive: Haven’t they heard of the internet?). In the review, Francis Jones says the EP has:
…everything from blustering rock riffs and crackling synths to Indian tablas and even a cameo performance from a hip-hop icon..
I had a sense of deja-vu and realised I had read something very similar recently. No matter, maybe it was a coincidence? While perusing my RSS feed earlier in the week, I came across a review from The Sun newspaper by Gordon Smart. Smart says Prospekt’s March EP has:
Thumping hip-hop jams, thundering metal workouts, Indian tablas and colliery brass bands all jostle for space..
There are a lot of similarities in that sentence and it could be down to the mind-numbingly boring music of Coldplay that elicits such parallel reviews, so I compared further..
From The Sun:
The EP kicks off in relatively conventional territory. Life In Technicolor ii is the opening instrumental from Viva La Vida with lyrics strapped on. ..Glass Of Water, meanwhile, showcases a pulverisingly heavy and never previously heard side of the band. It reminds me of MUSE at their most epic. Synths scream over thundering drum crashes and molten axe-riffage.
From HP:
Easing us in with a lyrics-supplemented version of ‘Life In Technicolor ii’ and the piano interlude of ‘Postcards From Far Away’, Coldplay then proceed to blast our expectations to smithereens with the Muse-style bombast of ‘Glass Of Water’.
OK to recap the similar sentiments:
1. The EP starts with Coldplay by numbers from Viva La Vida but with lyrics. Check.
2. ‘Glass of Water’ is so loud it might shatter stuff and sounds like Muse. Check.
3. The only extra reference in the HP review is to the piano interlude of ‘Postcards From Far Away’ which The Sun review doesn’t mention. A cursory look on Youtube turns up loads of short videos of the song however so it wouldn’t take a genius to look at the tracklisting and look it up on Youtube. See?
Let us move on:
From The Sun:
Echoes of BECK’s landmark hip-hop album Odelay are writ large through Rainy Day. Chris confronts the pressures of life in the public eye while a funky Californian breakbeat and sweeping strings motor the track along.The title track is woozily psychedelic with guitars gently chiming and strings sweeping… Lost+ and Lovers In Japan (Osaka Sun mix) are both just moderately tweaked versions of tracks on Viva La Vida. But it’s the final track, Now My Feet Won’t Touch The Ground, which is the most audacious thing the lads have ever recorded. It begins in standard Coldplay ballad territory with delicate guitars and mysterious lyrics…. Then Indian finger drums and a swelling array of trumpets and tubas arrive to take the track off into an extraordinary place.
From HP:
‘Rainy Day’ pings pinball like between stylistic forms, beats and guitars clattering into a strings swathed chorus. Things become more recognisably Coldplay with the assured balladry of the title-track. Elsewhere Jay-Z adds an extra dimension to ‘Lost’ and ‘Lovers In Japan’ is refined a touch with the ‘Osaka Sun Mix’. With brass and Eastern embellishments, ‘Feet Won’t Touch My Ground’ brings a last chameleonic change.
Recap:
1. ‘Rainy Day’ has lots of styles. Y’know much like Beck’s music. Check.
2. The title track sounds like you would expect Coldplay to sound. Check.
3. ‘Lost’ and ‘Lovers in Japan’ are slightly adjusted versions of those which appear on the album. Check.
4. ‘Feet Won’t Touch My Ground’ sounds different from all the other Coldplay stuff. And has brass and Indian elements. Check.
If you were to take Smart’s review and rewrite it, you would pretty much come up with Jones’ review. By that thinking, has Jones even heard it? On the other hand, the similarities could of course be a mere coincidence. Either way, I got a kick out of a Coldplay review, which is a feat in itself. What do you think?
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005 . He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Cara Magazine, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, founder of Lumo Club, club promoter, event curator and producer of gigs, listening parties & events in Dublin.
Quality research. Screw Hot Press.
im surprised you got past the fact that they managed to find two people to review coldplay.oh sorry one
Dude. I love your blog for the music not the music politics …
A
Gordon Smart is a tool…
as evidenced here: http://www.dubstepforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=785415
and followed up in private eye a couple of issues ago
haha I read it for both – the music and the politics
good eye though
What a total & utter waste of time. Thousands of years of music, the entire history of the world just a click away and you’re comparing reviews of a Coldplay Ep in Hot Press and The Sun? You’ve just got to have something better to write about than this.
Dan – It’s just an observation in fairness.
yes the reviews are similar but not so similar as to warrant accusations of plagiarism imho.
check out this thread from thumped to see the best of irish review robbery:
http://www.thumped.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=66581
That Loughrey-Grant thing is shocking- and completely shameless!
Mmmmm… one two many dejavu 😛
think you’ve made urself look a little foolish here nialler. the reviews are nowhere near similar enough to be to be bandying around accusations of plagiarism. the only real similarities i could see were the comparisons with muse and the ‘indian tablas’ reference, and in reality, both are distinctive sounds in their own right and how can you avoid mentioning either when u’re reviewing a 5 or 6 track e.p.?
we all (including me) love to slag hot press now and again when they rightfully deserve it, but this just comes across as a sad, snide and unnecessary jibe. i really thought u’d be above that, niall.
i think its valid opinion.
Hey, I created a couple word clouds with both posts. Kind of interesting, but not really given that I could give a f*ck if either one plagiarized the other. Here are the results anyway:
Hot Press: http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/317553/Irish_Exclusive_-_Coldplay_review
The Sun: http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/317554/The_Sun_-_Coldplay_review
What a bizarre backlash against this post.
Hot Press writers, perhaps?
Hmmmm…
I’m staying firmly on the fence on this one. Admittedly I can see where you’re coming from in that there are striking similarities between the two, but at the same time they are both reviewing the same source, and one with a limited playing span at that.
Even if a HP writer did copy a piece (in structure and sentiment, if not exactly in words) and called it his or her own, spare us the “Screw Hot Press” attitude (first comment) — as if it’s a HUGE NATIONAL scandal. A lazy EP review writer, bottom of the office reviewer-rung, cutting corners, chancing his or her arm (a bit), and maybe now he or she’ll be sprung or at least not try it again (if they did copy it) or have the good sense to copy from a paper no one else will ever see — The Welshman’s Gazette, perhaps.
Francis Jones is / was the editor of AU, presuming its the same person. So by that logic, he’s definitely not a bottom of the rung office reviewer.
I see what you’re saying Nialler, but I really don’t think that’s a particularly bad example of plagiarism…in the first example, the only major similarity is the word ‘tablas’. Surely if there were tablas on the EP, they’d warrant a mention from all reviewers? Perhaps one review was influenced by the other – and you do give loads of similarities. I’ve seen far, far worse examples of blatant plagiarism where entire sentences and even paragraphs were taken from people’s work – the Tara Loughrey-Grant reviews mentioned above, and an article by a friend of mine that was ripped off wholesale by a local English paper. Most plagiarists are stupid enough to think that people simply won’t notice.
At least in this case they made a very fair stab at pretending the ideas were all theirs 😉 (not condoning plagiarism, but you have to give them that much!)
There are distinct similarities, granted, but it’s a bit of a cheap shot calling it plagiarism, I feel anyway. It’s not blatant enough to warrant the strikethrough and outcry that follows. One could argue that there are high moral ground issues written all over this post. Conflict of interests perhaps?
Conflict of interest. It was just something I noticed. I would have posted it regardless of whether it was Hot Press or not. I thought there was enough there to suggest a post about it. People are reading too much into this post. I should never have bothered. There’s loads of nice music for you to listen to the site instead.
Fair enough Nialler I guess I overstated my point but you did ask what we thought! There are many reasons to knock Hot Press but this seemed a little sensationalist, an easy conclusion. Other blogs have laid into Hot Press for what seem personal reasons and I guess I had that in mind when I commented/over-reacted!
Just to reiterate – and this is a sentiment I’ve expressed every time the topic has been broached over the past decade, long before this minor “incident”:
Screw Hot Press.
ASA, why do people care so much about Hot Press to be so vitriolic? I find it to be irrelevant as a publication but I leave it there. Is it personal?
I reckon all vitriol directed towards Hot Press is justified by their ‘cash for kudos’ policy.
indeed
fuck hot press, the sun and coldplay – with no vazzo
end of
There are a handful of small similarities but not enough to warrant the accusation. How much variation do you expect to see in two neutral ‘descriptive rundown’ type articles on the same handful of songs? You could get ten other people to write previews of the same thing and most of them would come out looking very similiar. I don’t give a shit about Hot Press, but plagiarism is a serious thing to accuse a journalist of.
Serious, yet astoundingly common-place. Much easier to click Metacritic and start pasting sentences than it is to unravel a post-rock double album in 6 hours, I’ll tell you that.
It’s clearly the structure more than the exact wording that is ripped here, if anything is. The fact that two reviewers could not only say the same things roughly about something, but in the same order with pretty much the same weight, is a little suspect.
OK after all the hoo-haa I finally heard this out of interest:
In my opinion:
Pretty standard Coldplay fare these days.
Glass of Water might be rushing and full of piano crescendos but nothing near approaching the bombast of Muse and certainly no metal riffs. where is the molten-axe riffage promised by the Sun? I feel cheated.
Rainy Day in fairness is a reminiscent of Beck though I think it has more to do with the Nick Drake influence and a few tinny “hip-hop beats”
As for the “chameleonic” and “audacious” last song, it’s Coldplay channelled for the Parachute era with a but of tuba, there is no unheralded amazing ending. It’s a very simple song. WTF?
So to sum up, both of these reviews are highly misleading in the first place, and both went down a very similar path in descriptive terms that does not match up with what I just listened to..
Draw your own conclusions when you hear it. (if you’re arsed)
Just listened to the EP today.
Glass of Water is nothing at all like Muse. Muse couldn’t have been further from my mind when I listened to the track to be honest. And its not that loud either…. perhaps louder than the average Coldplay track but then thats not saying much.
Overall the EP alright. Nice to see them layer some lyrics on Life in Technicolor.
While I appreciate what you’re doing here, and I do recognize the lack of ingenuity on the part of the reviewers mentioned, you’ve got to understand this:
Coldplay’s publicist wrote most of the “catch-phrases” and issued a press kit to all the major publications. These press kits often offer up phrases to help the reviewers hone in on some verbage that is descriptive. And if it’s good, hopefully just copy and paste it.
It’s all part of the publicists job to offer up positive and descriptive spins on things.
Daniels info about publicists ‘suggesting’ catch phrases for reviews is eye opening to me anyway. I imagine there are large ads for the EP in HP if so that would seem to support the ‘cash for kudos’ claim by Clockwork Rob. Their seems to be quiet a few embattled Hot Press supporters out there. I think Nial prob found it interesting as reviewing is his area and at 32 responses was he wrong?