X&Y finds Coldplay arriving with a lot of baggage. Not only has Chris Martin dared to marry a Hollywood actress and name his baby Apple, but his band are also one of the biggest in the world at the moment. Plus they have inspired an insipid wave of soundalikes and are at least in some way responsible for the success of Keane and Athlete as well as seemingly being directly responsible for their record company's share price.

So, is this much-anticipated album any good? Well, it is, but it's certainly not the second coming. Neither is it the Second Coming, if you catch my drift. It has plenty of the old Martin magic and will sell by the bucket-loads, much to the relief of those EMI shareholders.

But there is a slight whiff of a band on autopilot at times here. Opener Square One is full of the glossy production and plaintive vocals that have made it most of Coldplay's hits so far, but is lacking an actual song underneath it all.

They certainly have an uncanny knack of writing songs that feel like you've known them all your life even on the first listen, and What If is another of those. It's a lovely ballad and you can see it causing mass swooning at stadiums across the world as well as blaring out of the radios in BMWs and Mondeos up and down our nation's motorways.

Thankfully, White Shadows offers something a bit different, with a rumbling bass-line not unlike a New Order song or two. It is a much needed injection of some pace and rhythm to proceedings and there's also a nice chorus too, and this could certainly be a hit single. Fix You slowly thing down again with Martin and his piano leading the way, building up to another big finish.

Talk has the hypnotic hook from Kraftwerk's Computer Love at its heart, and was at the centre of some confusion earlier in the year when it was leaked onto the internet and then scrapped, re-recorded, left off the album and then re-added to the album. Title track X&Y is another of those production efforts that almost manages to hide the lack of any substance. Almost...

Lead single Speed of Sound may have been beaten to top spot by Crazy Frog, but it's still one of the best things on here, nicely breaking the album up. Sure, it sounds like a remix of Clocks from A Rush of Blood To The Head, but it's a good remix and is very atmospheric, so we're not complaining. It's another song that will sound great blasting out at the Reebok Stadium in Bolton next month...

However, the problem is X&Y is that it's just too much of the same thing. By the 10th or 11th slow and immaculately produced song, they all start to blur into one. Coldplay are too good to be bland, but towards the end of the album even the hardiest listener starts to lose the will to live. I'm not suggesting they should have stuck a reggae song on there, but a few more lively efforts would have been nice.

That's not to say that there are any particularly bad songs on there, because there aren't really. On their own, you could see most of them reaching the top 10, and the album will certainly sell by the shedload. But you wonder where Coldplay can go from here, because they surely can't stick to this formula for too much longer before they get accused of being one-trick ponies.

For now though, their trick is still better than most of their contemporaries, so they won't mind...