Review Summary: The catchiest midlife crisis you'll ever hear.
Love or hate Coldplay, there's certainly no denying that they seem to have an interesting thought process when it comes to songwriting. The 2018 documentary
A Head Full of Dreams, released with their "Butterfly Package" CD/DVD combo pack, followed the band's life, from their inception and early days as a hotly demanded London pub and college campus band, or possibly the sad little band that could, to the larger-than-life stadium-filling superstars they are today, and the only thing that really seems to have changed is their popularity; nearly every album has had the band focusing on one individual song at a time, rather than doing what most bands do by writing hours worth of songs and lyric ideas and cherry picking the best ones. The most respectable thing about them to me has always been that whereas most post-U2 bands have been happy to pander to the lowest common denominator and do the very basic rock band type songwriting, Chris Martin on the other hand is happy to have the band's deceptively simple music mask the painful and personal meanings behind them. As great as this is, and although the band's path towards experimentation and more upbeat music in recent years has been very intriguing to say the least, it has also seen them sadly shedding what made them unique in the first place- while their previous LP,
A Head Full of Dreams was indeed a solid effort and a good pop album, a number of the tracks almost seemed to be trying too hard to be crowd-pleasers, almost as if they had taken the stereotype of them being "too boring" too close to heart.
So it goes without saying that, especially with the band coming to embrace developments in technology in recent years,
Everyday Life's pre-release hype has been curiously old-fashioned. It made its existence known via a number of classified ads in newspapers, plain, water-stained newspapers appearing in cities like Sydney and Hong Kong, and finally, a typewritten letter sent to the band's fanclub, announcing a double album. And the release of two lead singles showcased what its very opposing halves were to sound like- its first half, titled
Sunrise, was promoted with the jazzy, funky, Eastern-tinged "Arabesque", and the latter half,
Sunset, was promoted with "Orphans", sounding a bit more in the vein of a typical Coldplay track. And fortunately, said two singles showcase the two discs that make up
Everyday Life to a T; Coldplay finally taking the chains put upon them by fan expectation and public perception off, alongside a newer, angrier and more socially conscious Chris Martin.
Fortunately, that last part works pretty well for the most part, on
Everyday Life. The album is something of a loose concept album about a cynical, ageing man's views on how the world has currently gone to hell. The album wastes no time getting to this; with "Trouble in Town" tackling police violence, even going so far as to use audio from a video of an actual police brutality incident in 2013, "Daddy" being about children being forced to grow up fatherless in Eastern countries, "Arabesque" being about unfair perceptions of people of Arabic descent, and so forth. It's also probably the most direct we have seen Coldplay get, probably ever; when Chris is angry, it's very detectable, especially on tracks like "Guns", where he explores the US' preoccupation with firearms ("
Meltdown all the trumpets, all the trombones, and the drums/Who needs education, or a thousand spent at sums/War is good for business, cut the forest, it's so dumb/Only save your look-alikes, and fuck the other ones").
The musicianship is where the album truly excels, though. In the days since the album's leak, the song I've seen talked about most is "Trouble in Town", and it's hardly surprising to see why; the song starts out sounding like a typical Coldplay song with minimal instrumentation, but this all acts as a smokescreen for the second half, where the song suddenly
explodes out of nowhere in its second half, with Will Champion banging the ever-loving fuck out of his drums. It sounds like a burst of anger from the kings of bottling everything up, and it's well-earned at that too, feeling truly satisfying. Similarly, "Arabesque" is Coldplay as you've never heard them before, with the song strutting along at mid-tempo, with a funky saxophone riff taking the lead, all building up to one incredibly cathartic outro, where the gates of heaven seemingly open up, and Chris angrily declares that we all have "the same fucking blood!". The most unique moment, however, is the track that follows; "When I Need a Friend" features no instrumental backing, but rather a church choir accompanying Chris Martin as he wanders home alone, through the rain. It's one haunting track that sounds like it's coming from a dark, candle-lit cathedrial, and surely will be seen as a highlight in the band's discography for sure.
Which is what makes it all the more ironic that the weakest moments on this album is when it's business as usual for the band. "Champion of the World" has excellent lyrics but seems to waste them all on a middle-of-the-road Coldplay tune that sounds like a Mylo Xyloto filler. Similarly, "Guns" wastes what sounds like genuine anger on an unfinished, 2 minute acoustic backing. "Orphans" is by no means a bad song at all, but it's very clear it was a late addition to the album, and while the final track, "Everyday Life", rounds the album off in a satisfying fashion, the final "Hallelujah" section sounds less like Chris begging for peace and more like he couldn't think of a way to end the album and just made something up on the spot. This would probably not be as egregious either if
Sunrise didn't have all the album's ambitious material;
Sunset is where the band returns to their usual Coldplay hijinks, save for maybe the addition of "Cry Cry Cry", which feels more like cold, calculated risk if anything.
For all intents and purposes,
Everyday Life probably has no reason to exist, but I'm glad it does. The band is clearly in "we're done giving a fuck what everyone thinks" mode and it's pretty great to hear; by dropping the weight upon their shoulders placed by a desperate need to please every one of their fans, Coldplay finally are able to make more sincere and genuine music, and even more impressively, do so without attempting to fit into a mould of some sort . The band's renewed passion makes this probably their best album since
Viva La Vida; whether or not it will hold up as well as that album does, only time will tell, but it's great to see Coldplay finally taking no prisoners for once, and just doing things their own way. While the album at times does fall victim to its own ambition, and full listen-throughs can prove to be a tiring experience, the ambition itself is pretty refreshing from a band who has, more or less, spent the last decade trying too hard to appeal to two sets of fans.
