Parachutes

Four students who met at a London university made this album cheaply in 1999 and 2000, and it sounds like it: small, soft, mostly acoustic guitar and piano with Chris Martin's high falsetto on top. Before Coldplay became the biggest band in the world, playing arenas full of confetti, they were a modest, melancholy guitar band, and Parachutes is that band. Yellow, written as a love song with no real subject, became the hit that changed their lives. The rest is gentler and sadder than anything they made after.