Composed of material remaining from the Viva La Vida sessions, the Prospekt’s March EP is an odd bunch of songs. Despite Martin’s claims that any of these tracks could’ve made the already diverse album, everything here definitely feels like leftovers, or at least tangents. The first issue here would be that, despite it being pushed as an eight-track expansion of Viva La Vida five months after the fact, Prospekt’s March is a bit thin on new material. Three of the songs here had appeared already in slightly different forms on Viva La Vida. The alterations in the “Lovers In Japan (Osaka Sun Mix)” are pretty negligible, while “Lost+” is “Lost!” plus a Jay-Z verse. Otherwise, there’s “Life In Technicolor ii,” which takes the instrumental opening track of Viva La Vida and fleshes it out with vocals and verse-chorus structure. I seem to remember being excited back in ’08 by what a fully-formed “Life In Technicolor” might sound like, but now I realize that was ridiculous, because the finished version wound up trite (“Oh love, don’t let me go/ Won’t you take me where the street lights glow?” goes the chorus) and squanders all the mystery of the original instrumental.

As for the new stuff, “Glass Of Water” and “Rainy Day” are significantly brighter in tone than the majority of Viva La Vida, the latter particularly seeming like Coldplay’s oddball sketch of a long-lost summer song from the late ’90s. “Prospekt’s March/Poppyfields” and “Now My Feet Won’t Touch The Ground” begin as primarily acoustic callbacks to the band’s earlier work, the former a close melodic relative to A Rush Of Blood To The Head material. All the songs are pretty good additions to Coldplay’s body of work, though it’s unlikely any of them will stick with you too much. Thing is, Coldplay has a history of pretty strong B-sides. “One I Love” (“In My Place” B-side), “The World Turned Upside Down” (“Fix You” B-side) and “Moving to Mars” (from the Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall EP that preceded Mylo Xyloto) are all better than about half of the respective albums from which they were omitted, leaving you with the sense that there must’ve been some more memorable material from the Viva La Vida sessions that could’ve made Prospekt’s March a more important release.