Coldplay rocks packed arena

He looked like a muscle spasm incarnate, a drunken ballerina, twitching, trembling, leaping, lunging, posing and pinwheeling about the stage, as if his flesh were a prison he was trying to escape from.

Through it all, he smiled like the cat who not only ate the canary, but devoured most of its kin as well.

Coldplay frontman Chris Martin is not prone to small gestures -- he's the kind of guy who favors bear hugs over handshakes, wet kisses over dry eyes -- and his band follows suit: their tunes spin on an axis of melodrama and emotional extravagance, with even their quietest moments tending to build toward something grand and deafening.

As such, they're an ideal arena rock band in an age where increasingly few contemporary acts sound at home in large halls.

But as they demonstrated at a packed MGM Grand Garden on Saturday night, this bunch is skilled at making big rooms feel small.

Part of it is logistics: The band's fond of hurling themselves at the crowd, and at times, they play within arms reach of their adoring fanbase.

Midway through the show on Saturday, the group decamped to a small, illuminated platform on the arena floor, and, huddled together in one another's armpits, they deconstructed a pair of tunes with electronic drums and an enveloping, melodic drone.

Later on in the show, the foursome marched through the crowd to the rafters in the back of the venue, where they played spare, acoustic versions of "Green Eyes" and "Death Will Never Conquer," the latter sung by drummer Will Champion (how's that for a name?).

Proximity aside, the main reason Coldplay seems tailored for cavernous spaces is the songs themselves: they sound as if they were written with stadiums in mind, and indeed, they elicited some soccer-style chants from the raucous, rabid crowd throughout the show.

Plus, Coldplay puts the hammer down on the majority of its catalog live, hence a song like the band's breakout hit, the contemplative, understated ballad "Yellow," grows fangs on stage with the band turning it into a lusty sing-along complete with crashing drums and lots of fists in the air.

During its 90-minute set at the MGM Grand, Coldplay played almost all of its latest album, the dense, searching "Viva La Vida," and rightfully so: it's the band's trickiest, most hard-to-pin down effort, an album that veers from textured soundscapes to exultant art rock.

Moody, dark-hued rocker "Yes" blossomed like a black rose on stage, with Jonny Buckland's guitar ricocheting through the song in haunting arcs, "42" morphed from a porcelain-delicate ballad to a climactic rocker while an organ-fired "Lost!" got the crowd clapping along with hands over their heads.

The band matched its sonic ostentation visually, with a half-dozen large projection globes dangling from the rafters, pistoning up and down.

And during a triumphant-sounding "Lovers in Japan," an ocean of multicolored papier-mâché butterflies rained down from above, marking the crowd feel as if they were caught in the midst of a ticker tape parade.

And in a way they were.

The show felt like an extended victory lap for a band at the peak of its powers, a big, sweaty (and deserving) high-five to the ego.

"I'm just waitin' for the shine to wear off," Martin sang at one point, and if this night was any indication, he'll be waiting a little while longer.

Contact Jason Bracelin at 383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com.