Storm clouds on the horizon?

After a remarkable, and appropriate, show of deference, some of the Democratic party's nuttier elements are making a run at Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) slammed Roberts over several civil rights memos he wrote while at the DoJ and White House Counsel's office during the Reagan administration. Today, Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) joined in the fun.

When will Democrats learn?

Hey, we don't control the Capitol or the Oval Office. We should be so lucky President Bush nominated someone as unoffensive as Roberts, with his impeccable education and impressive legal credentials. Fortunately, most Senate Democrats have been receptive to Roberts.

"I was so pleased to meet such an outstanding nominee," said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana. Added Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska: "I don't see anything that's going to be disturbing" in his record.

Roberts seems, by Bush standards, relatively moderate. After all, with Republicans in strong control of the Senate and the White House, the President could easily have nominated Ted Olson, or even worse, a wacko like Janice Rogers Brown. As far as the hard right is concerned, Roberts is weak on their issues; it's almost like Bush is offering the Senate an olive branch.

We may yet find out that Roberts is a wolf in sheep's clothing. I think, though, that in this situation, Democrats would be wise to find the silver lining.

Supremely Out of Proportion

Female Senators led by Mary Landrieu have written an open letter to resigning Supreme Court Justice O'Connor asking her to reconsider.

This probably won't surprise most people, of course, because the Supreme Court is the most politically divisive branch of the U.S. government.

But why? This should be the least divisive of the three branches. The high court exists only to judge existing laws. One would think that the American people would be focused on the lawmaking process more so than the lawjudging process if they were truly separated as the founders planned.

But they're not.

The Supreme Court has become a big player in the law making game. Policies such as abortion, gay marriage, education spending, property rights, freedom of speech and environmental protection are controlled or likely to be controlled primarily by state or federal courts.

The Supreme Court exists to settle debates, not create them, and it's no wonder that the aforementioned issues are as divisive and unstable as they are: the people and their elected officials have been circumvented by an unelected oligarchy.

That U.S. Senators would write an infantile plea to a Supreme Court Justice asking her to participate in what is effectively political trickery (ie, waiting until 2008 to resign) exposes how far out of proportion the court's importance has become.

Album ReviewColdplay: X&Y

Rating: 7.0

The prevailing theory of Hippocrates’ day was that diseases mental and physical were caused by an imbalance of the four humours—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, the last of which (in Greek, melancholia) was thought to be responsible for depression. Today, dopamine, serotonin, monoamine oxidase, and norepinephrine have replaced the four elements of antiquity, which is fortunate, for Chris Martin at least, because Hippocrates never came up with a black bile inhibitor. Not that it would have mattered; for all its weeping strings and heartbroken lyrics symptomatic of a terminal case of melancholia, most of Coldplay’s music is numbly empty of bitter bile and salty anger, much less sweet release.

No, Martin’s music is afflicted by an acutely modern malaise, one less romantically tragic than Yeats’ and Hamlet’s.  Clinical psychology today speaks the language of the scientist, not the philosopher or the mystic, and the scientist’s words don’t offer the hope of deliverance and salvation in poetic suffering but an assurance that it’s not your fault, it’s a chemical imbalance and a prescription for Mother’s Little Helper. For better or for worse, it is a message devoid of human emotion. Events aren’t accompanied by feelings of anger, bitterness, or ecstasy but by a persistent whitewash of dull aches and an inability to expect a turn for the best.

Which is altogether a fairly accurate assessment of Coldplay’s new album X&Y; essentially, it's emo music minus the emo. Martin delivers all his lines in the same tone, regardless of what he's singing about, but that's no surprise. The instrumentation is clean and crisp, and the production is flawless, but no songs on X&Y compare favorably to the anthemic melody of “Clocks,” the nihilism of “Don’t Panic,” or the beauty of “The Scientist.” That’s not to say the music on Coldplay’s newest effort isn’t anthemic, melodic, nihilist, or at times, beautiful.  The problem is that Coldplay desperately tries to evoke those responses while being so utterly inoffensive that they inspire a different reaction, something like “eh”: like novocaine, X&Y is pleasantly numbing, but unlike its dangerous older brother heroin, it won’t take you anywhere you haven’t been before.

This lack of flair strikes me as a relatively new development. I don’t remember Parachutes or A Rush of Blood to the Head to be this wanting for lyrical subtlety, metaphor, and allusion—despite that the chorus of Coldplay’s most famous song (“and noooooothing else compares”) is oddly derivative of Sinead O’Connor. Martin's songwriting alternates between unimaginative bluntness and the confoundingly obtuse. “I feel low,” he sings, on the appropriately titled “Low.”  And because Coldplay rarely strays from middle-of-the-road pop, there are equally few truly good and truly bad songs on X&Y. One of the truly bad is the plodding “Swallowed in the Sea,” where Martin’s lyrics veer from the banally literal into the nonsensical, including this absolute gem of a hook: “And I could write a song / A hundred miles long / Well, that's where I belong / And you belong to me.”

To be fair, and because I actually enjoy this album more than this review is letting on, Coldplay makes some better than average music when they’re not pretending to be the autistic love child of Thom Yorke and Joni Mitchell. X&Y alternates upbeat and downbeat tracks, and as you might have guessed, in this reviewer’s opinion the upbeat songs are infinitely better than the weepy downers. The lead song, “Square One,” kicks off strong—dramatic without trying too hard, balanced, brash, and smart. “White Shadows” brings more guitars, as does “Talk,” which is far and away the best X&Y has to offer. If Coldplay could turn out a full album of songs with hooks, movement, and production as good as those on “Talk,” the gushing praise would actually be justified.

Still, I’m obviously not as excited about this album as most are.  Nothing here will make you say it could only have been pulled off by Coldplay; it could have been any five other musicians and it wouldn't make a difference. X&Y sounds like music written by a Turing machine—convincing enough, but with a lingering artificial feel. So it’s only natural that the cover art for X&Y is a five-digit mathematical code, that last album’s art was a wire-mesh model of a head and neck, that Coldplay’s two big singles from A Rush of Blood were titled “Clocks” and “The Scientist”, and that their new album’s name is a statement of formal logic.  Coldplay serve up a double helping of melancholy without offering any dessert of passionate cathartic release.  There is little beauty in Martin’s breakdown: he and his band lack the emotive power and desperation of Radiohead and the righteous anger of U2; two bands to whom Coldplay owe much and are often compared but whose torch they have dropped. Martin seems more likely to pop a Zoloft than reach for a Kleenex or raise the black flag.

Martin’s is material that in more talented hands, like Thom Yorke’s or a pre-“Beautiful Day” Bono’s, produces a cathartic effect unmatched by any art form. But Bono and Yorke are precisely what Martin is not—artists and poets—in addition to being outstanding entertainers. X&Y could have been uplifting but instead is mostly depressing, but not because it deals with regrets of loves lost via melodramatic piano arrangements.  Rather than being swept up in Martin’s emotion and release, listeners are left with the feeling of lukewarm anesthesia that makes this album both easily accessible and enjoyable, but also unchallenging and therefore unremarkable—the musical equivalent of a new pair of Gap khakis. X&Y is a pleasant listen but inspires neither passionate highs nor lows, it does not ask us to reconsider much, and we are left, like the band itself, complacent and passive, looking for the expected transcendence that remains just beyond grasp.