For a band made up of four unfailingly polite British lads, Coldplay inspires an awful lot of antipathy. Alan McGee, founder of influential UK record label Creation, which was once home to Oasis, famously referred to Coldplay as “music for bedwetters” around the time they appeared on the scene with their 2000 debut album, “Parachutes.”

For many critics, Coldplay’s success has been perplexing, since it borrows much of its sound from U2 and Radiohead, but lacks both the world-beating bravado and dominating presence of Bono and the arty, experimental approach and paranoiac edge of Thom Yorke. In comparison, Coldplay often seems, well, bland.

Underneath the exterior, though, Coldplay mastermind Chris Martin has a few quirks of his own. Fiercely intelligent and more than a bit manic, Martin takes critics’ attacks to heart more than most rock stars of his stature, and Coldplay’s third album, “X & Y,” is almost as much a riposte to those who called his music boring as it is an attempt to hold onto the massive audience his band gained with the much-loved “A Rush of Blood to the Head.” “X & Y” can be called a lot of things (brilliant, ambitious, expansive, overreaching, pompous, precious, exhausting), but boring is not one of them.

Martin has said that the title “X & Y” is supposed to describe his own slightly bipolar worldview, in which life can seem perfect at one moment and bleak the next. The album’s sound mirrors this description; songs start off slowly before bursting into massive, full-band arrangements accompanied by strings, keyboards and layers of vocals, and then sinking back into simple, spare codas. “Square One” is a suitably epic opener, with Martin crooning, “The future’s for discovering / The space in which we’re traveling” over a spacey wash of keyboards, before the rest of the band tumbles into a propulsive groove similar to “Rush of Blood’s” opener, “Politik.”

Martin sure has a lot of worries for a guy with a beautiful Hollywood actress wife and a new daughter. On the Elton John-style ballad “What If,” he wonders, “What if you should decide / That you don’t want me there by your side?” in what appears to be a thinly veiled plea to wife Gwyneth Paltrow. Fortunately, Martin abandons the moping when Buckland breaks in with a strong guitar riff, and the band builds to another soaring chorus.

“White Shadows” betrays more of the ’70s Bowie influence that Coldplay have been talking up in interviews, with pulsing bass and pounding drums carrying the song along on a motorik groove similar to many on the Thin White Duke’s “Low” album. The synths of “White Shadows” give way to churchy organ on “Fix You,” the album’s high point. A hymn for the downtrodden, Martin offers his sympathies (“When you love someone and it goes to waste / What could be worse?”) before declaring, “I will try to fix you,” as the band kicks the church door down and rushes in with booming drums and a choral part inspired by “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

After this strong opening quartet, however, “X & Y” flags slightly. “Talk” steals the riff from Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love,” but ends up sounding more like a deliciously bombastic U2 anthem. An earlier version of this track that leaked to the Internet a few months ago serves to point out some of “X & Y’s” problems; the original had a delicate, spacious quality that has been lost amid the layers of sound that the band have applied to the finished version. After spending 18 months in the studio attempting to perfect “X & Y,” Coldplay has ended up overcooking a few tracks that would have benefited from simpler arrangements. The acoustic strumalong of “A Message” would have served as a nice breather between some of the heavier tracks, but instead the band plug in and give it the same kitchen-sink treatment.

These are minor problems, however, given the overall strength of the rest of the album. “X & Y” is a lot like life itself: big, complex, a bit messy and not quite perfect, but no less beautiful for it. Chris Martin would no doubt approve.