In keeping with a trend started earlier this year by the good folk at Maxim, I've decided to review the forthcoming Coldplay album, Viva La Vida, without having listened to it.

I am basing my opinion on the words contained in the song titles, which have recently been released in the form of what is known as a "tracklisting". While it's not strictly possible to get an idea of what the songs sound like from a tracklisting, this is but a trifling matter. Watch.

1. Life In Technicolor

The opening track sees Coldplay energised by the knowledge that their new album needs to sell only 734,000,000 copies in order for their record label to afford the snack-size Snickers bars for their quarterly board meetings. They express this freedom by dressing in colourful clothes, like Hadouken!.

2. Cemetries Of London

The second track finds Coldplay suddenly somewhat depressed at the reality of the sentiment behind track one.

3. Lost!

Track 3 has Chris and the boys hiding away from the financial pressure being placed on their noggins by settling down for a look at the shenanigans gwanning on a mysterious island in the south Pacific or thereabouts.

4. 42

All these worries have the chaps pondering the meaning of life and stuff. This song is about the fact that the meaning of life is 42.

5. Lovers In Japan/Reign Of Love

The midway point on the album isn't actually a Coldplay song at all, but in fact a track that fell of a Peter Gabriel album from 1986.

6. Yes

Inspired by the overblown aesthetics contained within the previous track, "Yes" sees Coldplay penning an ode to another bombastic act from years gone by. That act is Yes.

7. Viva La Vida

Despite the many jokes about how this album/song title was perhaps influenced by Ricky Martin, the inspiration actually came from Dana International's Eurovision winner "Diva", which contains the lyric Viva la diva. Chris just misheard it, the dolt.

8. Violet Hill

This number is about a little old lady who lives at the end of the road.

9. Strawberry Swing

This is a new dance Coldplay and their record label are hoping will sweep the planet, a la Los del Rio's Macarena. It involves flailing one's arms about while holding strawberries in one's hands. The trick is to manage this move without bursting the fruit and covering oneself, and one's dancing partner(s), in sticky strawberry juice. There is a suggestion that the band have had too much time on their hands recently.

10. Death And All His Friends

The inevitable comedown after such a jolly, fruit-related highpoint, the closing track sees Chris Martin take on the persona of The Grim Reaper, while his bandmates pose as his "friends". The irony being, of course, that Death has no friends. He did have, but he killed them all when he tried to give them a drunken cuddle. What does this irony mean in the context of the album as a whole? This will probably only become clear with repeated listening.

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