Parachutes is the Grammy Award-winning debut album by Coldplay, released on July 10, 2000, in the UK and on November 7, 2000, in the U.S. The album quickly rose to #1 in the UK, remaining in the top ten for thirty-three weeks, and established Coldplay as one of the leading bands of the alternative rock and britpop revival of the early 2000s. The album spawned four hit singles: Shiver, Yellow, Trouble, and Don't Panic. While Parachutes peaked at only #51 on the Billboard 200 in the U.S., it still managed to sell over two million copies within a year, solidifying Read more on Last.fm.
Today, after some eleven years on the Billboard charts, Coldplay is both marginalized and polarized by a divided media. There’s food for thought on both sides of the argument. The fact that they did little to change their own sound until the experimental Viva La Vida lost them points with initial fans. On the same token, many saw that album as an arty stretch that didn’t play to the groups strengths.
My position in all of this, as a music lover and critic by hobby, has been the same since I first listened to them. Parachutes was a terrific, epic British rock album. Being their first, it had the signature sound that carried over years later into A Sudden Rush, X0, and, in places, Viva. The difference is that Parachutes had a workman like quality to it, really good songs played and recorded really well. That was its strength. It wasn’t groundbreaking in a Radiohead kind of way. It was simply a tightly arranged set of emotionally driven tunes that produced rave reviews and broad smiles. To this day, I think its their crowning statement….before the soccer moms and the arenas and blah, blah blah.