I’ll be straight with you, I’ve never been the biggest fan of Coldplay. I find their whole aesthetic just a watered-down version of Radiohead and U2, so it was with mild enthusiasm that I approached the prospect of attending an advance listening of their new album, X&Y. That’s right, an advance listening.

Welcome to the “in-house playback”, a relatively recent phenomenon brought over from the States ostensibly to combat the potential piracy of major releases, but partly to increase the sense of importance attached to a new release. Having braved the Tolkien trek across half of London to get to the EMI offices in Hammersmith, I was escorted to the plush, purpose-built playback room, a sort of cross between the bridge of the Starship Enterprise and a cosmetic dental surgery.

After being strip searched – just kidding – after handing over my bag, mobile phone and the deeds to my house to my Watcher, a security guard making sure I wasn’t recording the music, I was plied with some truth serum passing itself off as tea, lay back in a comfy, reclining leather chair and put my headphones on. “Don’t fall asleep now,” warned my Watcher, though whether my impending slumber would be induced by the reclining leather chair or from the soporific new Coldplay album was unclear.

X&Y was meant to be Coldplay’s Kid A, but too much studio noodling rendered their initial efforts redundant and, in their own words, soulless. With only a month of production time remaining they binned the work and concetrated on a more raw, emotionally honest record, starting back at square one, coincidentally the title of the first track on the new album.

Martin has complained that it must be judged purely on musical terms, but to be fair it’s hard not to read biographical details into the well-meaning but cliché-ridden lyrics portraying him as the anxious parent, fretting over God, Gwyneth and baby Apple’s future.

First impressions are that this is less immediate than previous Coldplay albums. There’s nothing here that has the same staying power as Yellow or Clocks, and there are fewer anthems this time around.

Here the widescreen emotion is toned down and instead emphasis is placed on driving, rockier numbers and more restrained electro tracks. Influences? U2, Low-era David Bowie, Pink Floyd, the motorik grooves of Kraftwerk and Neu, plus the solemn soundscapes of early Eighties bands such as Depeche Mode, Talk Talk, and Echo and the Bunnymen. However, the disparate influences brought into the mix are there for sustaining a particular melancholic mood rather than cramming the album with new ideas. Album highlights? Fix You, Speed of Sound, What If, A Message, and Swallowed in the Sea.

Much of the album has a hymnal quality. A Message borrows from Samuel Crossman’s hymn My Song Is Love Unknown, and features Martin as the Vicar of Albion preaching to his flock. And with their REM melodies and ecological concern, this isn’t so much Automatic for the People as Automatic for the Planet. Martin’s vaguely existential worries as he imagines a future of desertification constitute a new brand of environmental emo for the Fair Trade-coffee drinking masses.

The band aims for the swelling emotional surges of Spiritualized but falls short. Too many times they begin the climactic ascent to the scale a song’s glacial peaks only to halt and head back to base camp. There are few killer choruses this time around and whether this record will be able to induce the same arms aloft sing-alongs at this summer’s festivals remains to be seen.

X&Y may be their most layered and musically dense record, but whether its hidden depths will be revealed on repeated listens is something that I wasn’t able to explore in one sitting. But even if this isn’t the masterpiece that Martin makes it out to be, it’s a group hug of record, the cosy mundanity of which will comfortably reinstate Coldplay’s hegemony of the charts.

With a customary Bono-like hubris, Chris Martin has proclaimed this their most fully realised album and that it should be their last. Coldplay’s detractors would greet his comments with cheers but is this really the band’s swansong? I doubt it. Their finest hour has yet to come.