Risk schmisk. An album just like the last one – now that really would have been a risk for Coldplay. But pre-release murmurs that their new album represents a leap into the unknown put you in mind of someone being made to walk the plank and them saying they fancied a dip anyway.

The fact is that there’s no reason to believe that Coldplay are a gambling band. For album two, A Rush of Blood to the Head, they super-sized the formula that had worked so well on Parachutes. Having gone global, prudence prevailed with album three. X&Y stacked up unspecific stadium anthems that, in emotional terms, seemed to do the same job as the American condiment Tony Fatso’s Everything Sauce. No wonder EMI’s new owner, Guy Hands, loves them. With his experience in private equity and Coldplay’s safe, steady growth, he would have seen their portfolio as a low-risk, high-return investment.

Coldplay don’t take their part in all this lightly. With the help of their co-producer Brian Eno, the most welcome addition to their sound is a sense of motion and eagerness to get to the next idea, rather than merely pumping up the same one for four minutes.

The exploratory trips to South America are theoretically audible in the acoustic syncopations and handclaps of Cemeteries of London – and yet Coldplay’s flamenco rattles like the rolling stock of an intercity train. Chris Martin’s period spent stalking Arcade Fire is represented on the rallying whoops of Life in Technicolor but, by jettisoning any other vocals for a dulcimer, the song should sound fantastic rather than functional when they haul it around the stadiums.

Strings – the thick, woozy Eastern kind favoured by Beatles and Bunnymen – loom large on several songs, most notably on the excitably Nymanesque Viva la Vida and Yes. On the latter Martin sings wearily: “I’m just so tired of this loneliness,” in a manner more like that of the pop star known to fly off the handle at paps who impinge on his family life. After about a minute of Martin’s plaintive ivory-stroking, 42 is Magazine attempting Kashmir on six too many espressos. With the bedside manner of a doctor visiting a terminally ill patient, Martin opens Death and All His Friends with hushed reassurances before his band spring to life and roles suddenly become reversed. “I don’t wanna follow death and all his friends,” shrieks the singer.

According to Eno, what it all amounts to is the sound of a band “living at the edge of their possibilities”. Such precisely worded praise could just as easily apply to the logic-defying leaps of inspiration found on a Radiohead album as it does a band of rather talented musicians desperately trying to stay interesting.

Mostly, Viva La Vida betrays the touch of conscientious artisans rather than the lateral lightning flash of genius. Either way, though, the good news for Guy Hands is that it sounds like a million-seller. Great. Now he can go ahead and drop everyone else.

(Parlophone, TMS £11.99, call 0845 6026328)

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