Review Summary: The end of the slope.
Chris. We need to talk. Understand where I’m coming from here, I really do like your band. You and your buddies were the little sad band that could. From nowhere you unceremoniously cranked out two of the most influential and successful pop albums of the decade. And in my opinion you did so in style. Yes you’ve always took a whole lot of inspiration from other bands, no the lyrics in your songs have never been great, but at the heart of your music there has always been a very sincere, emotional core that connected with a lot of people. Even when you hit your first creative slump on “X&Y” you hunkered down and came back with the much more adventurous and grandiose “Viva la Vida” which made “X&Y” seem much more like a slightly awkward transition than a creative dud.
But now? Now it’s 2015. “Viva La Vida” is more than 7 years old. And I’m done making excuses. In hindsight it seems like “Viva La Vida” was the last spark of a band that was running into more and more artistic dead ends. After that you tried to go the electro pop route on “Mylo Xyloto” and already started to sound like a “Chris Martin and band” vanity project. That worrying trend intensified to an upsetting degree on the insufferable “Ghost stories”, where most of the tracks featured such basic instrumentation that Coldplay hardly sounded like a band anymore. All of this leads me to believe, that the other members of Coldplay are no longer relevant in the creative process of your songwriting and that “Coldplay” (which is still quite the valuable brand) is just the “Chris Martin ego vessel” at this point.
Of course I don’t have any evidence to back up this claim. How else do you explain this complete train wreck of an album though? How else do you explain a completely lifeless, bland, uninspired stab at disco pop like “Bird” with its hackneyed, pre-processed beat (didn’t your band feature a pretty decent drummer?) and uninspired, twinkly guitar loop? How else do you explain that your attempt at creating another one of those piano ballads you were once famous for (“Everglow”) is such a sad, banal, whiny slog that fails to resonate on any level? How else do you explain the sad attempt to squeeze an “RnB” song into a piano ballad on “Hymn for the Weekend”? When you got Rihanna to do a part on “Princess of China” I wasn’t a fan of it, but it was nowhere near as bad as this completely overproduced, obnoxious and frankly cringe worthy mess. How exactly did you think the stomping RnB beat and Beyonces forceful vocals would fit with your nasally falsetto and the slapdashed piano riff? (Hint: They do not fit. at all.)
I could go on and deconstruct nearly every song on this album in this manner. The repeated attempts of sounding “grandiose” and “epic” crumble under the weight of a completely overproduced “sound-soup” while not being properly supported by your paper thin songwriting. The songs where you try to “let loose” just don’t play to any of the strengths your band once had and end up sounding wholly unremarkable. These songs seem to look so desperately for that big pop hook and can never find it. The piano, once your signature instrument, is mostly relegated to playing the most basic loops over and over again and being completely drowned out as soon as the chorus hits. The lyrics are even simpler than usual and often times downright painful this time around. The laundry list of huge problems that drag down your album continues for quite a while.
Remember when the music-community accused you of going the arena-rock U2 route when you released “X&Y”? Well, for all the (mostly deserved) ridicule that U2 received over the past 20 years for failing to live up to “Achtung Baby” and “The Joshua Tree”, at no point in their career did they release an album that sounded so out of touch with their strengths and so desperate to capitalize on an ill-conceived notion of what made them popular in the first place. At this point I’d be glad if you still tried to rip off U2.
Is every second of this album as unsalvageable as the two examples I picked earlier? Not quite. Lead single “Adventure of a Lifetime” features a funky bassline and some pretty guitar work, the upbeat vocals don’t sound as forced as on other songs, but it’s still dragged down by cringe inducing lyrics and unnecessary electro-gimmicks. “Up&Up” while suffering from bare bones instrumentation in the verses and (again) overproduction in the chorus, is at least reminiscent of some of your former strengths. Aside from those few sudden flickers of quality, there is nothing left of the band you started 15 years ago. We've seen all the tricks you have up your sleeve as a songwriter and you haven’t added any new ones to the repertoire since 2007.
So Chris. This needs to stop. I know you've said that this will be the last Coldplay album. I have my doubts that this statement was anything but another cynical marketing ploy. But I implore you. Make good on that promise. This album is the sound of a 7 year long downward slope finally crashing into the ground and exploding in the process.
Do everyone a favor and let Coldplay rest in peace.
