ACL Festival: 10 reasons to warm up to Coldplay

It might sound absurd to mount a defense of Coldplay, a band that's won seven Grammy awards, played every festival, generally enjoyed positive press and nabbed more than 50 million worldwide sales. Not a lot of people feel the need to shed tears for the sweeping, ever-sensitive foursome from London; at the end of the day front man Chris Martin, drummer Will Champion, lead guitarist Jonny Buckland and bassist Guy Berryman can always go to sleep on their enormous piles of money.

But for all its success, few contemporary bands inspire such vitriol and derision. In this sense Coldplay has something in common with the Black Eyed Peas — another simultaneously popular and despised band from the aughts. That disparity also makes Coldplay this Austin City Limits Music Festival's equivalent to the Eagles last year. Both bands have sold tens of millions of records and play to enormous crowds while also being widely mocked .

"I have never encountered one person who has a kind word to say about Coldplay," wrote Andy Gill in the Independent in 2008, in a piece titled "Why I Hate Coldplay. "None of my personal or professional acquaintances, nobody in the street or the local café, not a single soul will admit to liking Coldplay or purchasing their music. Indeed, most seem to agree that they epitomize everything that's wrong with modern rock music. So who's buying all their albums?"

New York Times music critic Jon Pareles called them "the most insufferable band of the decade." British music mag NME awarded "Viva la Vida" 8 out of 10 points and went on to nominate it as one of the worst albums of the year. Perhaps the largest bastion of bleeding-edge music criticism, Pitchfork, has responded to Coldplay's four albums with a collective "meh," awarding them, chronologically, scores of 5.3, 5.1, 4.9 and 6.9. Even Chris Martin is aware of his place on the hipness pecking order.

"I always thought that if you were a 16-year-old and liked Coldplay you'd keep it quiet," Martin told the Telegraph in 2008. "We aren't cool and never will be."

"The reason why we do well is because U2 is still on holiday," Martin cheekily told "60 Minutes" that same year. "So, you know, as soon as they come back, we drop down the ladder a bit. We're in our last week of substitute teaching."

At the risk of forever revoking any pretensions to music snob-dom, I feel the need to say the following: poppycock.

Because though Coldplay is far from contemporary music's most thrilling band, it's still a winningly restless, smart bunch, with an expert sense of melody, a savvier lyrical sense than it is generally credited for and a voracious appetite for influences. Its four albums and accompanying boatload of memorable singles comprise an impressive body of work.

In an attempt — likely futile — to polish the band's image, I submit 10 reasons the time has come for a critical rethinking of Coldplay . Consider them 10 reasons Coldplay are worth catching on Friday, even opposite a pop provocateur as entertaining as Kanye West.

In Favor of Coldplay

1. The band hasn't stood still. It would have been easy for Coldplay to replicate its breakout hit — the lilting and mopey "Yellow," off debut "Parachutes" — ad infinitum. But for all the "all Coldplay songs sound the same" criticisms, the band's made a noticeable effort to diversify with each release. Each represents an honest attempt at growth, from the greater assurance propelling "A Rush of Blood to the Head" to the spacier, Kraftwerk-inspired sounds on "X&Y" to the Brian Eno-produced big tent sonic inclusion of "Viva la Vida."

2. The band is ambitious. Martin has occasionally caught flack for talking up Coldplay within the same context as U2 or Radiohead, or openly voicing his desire to write a song as good as Paul McCartney's "Yesterday." And though that might seem like folly — Coldplay will never hit the creative heights of U2 at its giddy zenith — ambition is one of the principal virtues of a pop band.

3. They wrote "Clocks." Come on, you can't deny it: "Clocks," the centerpiece of the album "A Rush of Blood to the Head," is a brilliant radio single. All cryptic and faintly ominous lyrics wrapped up in a fiendishly memorable piano line, there's a reason "Clocks" was inescapable for more than a year after release. Few songs straddle the delicate/anthemic divide so effectively. Which leads us more broadly into ...