A series of EPs released through 1998 and 1999 leading up to the eventual 2000 release of Parachutes, Safety, Brothers & Sisters, and The Blue Room are listed together because collectively they form a part of the band’s career too big to be left off this list entirely, but also because they share so many songs between them (and, later, Parachutes) that it’d be a bit redundant to talk about each of them separately, particularly because they really do feel of a single piece. Starting with Safety, which was mainly intended as a demo to send to record companies, these EPs represent the earliest manifestation of Coldplay figuring out their identity as a band, and they show an even more nascent artist than was glimpsed on Parachutes. The unending Travis and Radiohead comparisons are accurate enough here, though to be fair that’s likely what a lot of young British bands sounded like in the late ’90s when they were just starting to play around their hometowns. There are also echoes of Jeff Buckley, nowhere more evident than the guitars spiraling in “Brothers And Sisters” and then snarling in “Only Superstition.” If you put the three EPs together and cut out the redundancies, you have an album’s worth of strong material, including “High Speed” and an early version of “Don’t Panic,” both of which would later become highlights on Parachutes. What’s interesting is how little this sounds like the Coldplay we’ve come to know. There are few pianos, the riffs are more gnarled than cascading, and the band is still gripped by a deeper melancholy, one where the edges hadn’t yet been softened for mainstream consumption. They were still finding their way, so the accusations of Coldplay being derivative are perhaps more applicable here than on any other subsequent release, but the songcraft was already there and taken together Safety, Brothers & Sisters, and The Blue Room remain a worthwhile document of Coldplay’s earliest stages.