Review Summary: Everyone’s gone fucking crazy
Admitting you like Coldplay in the current day can draw you some mockery. Forever the architects of “sad, boring music that middle aged mothers listen to”, they’ve been some what unfairly typecasted. While their music has steadily morphed from heart on the sleeves indie rock to a dayglo explosion of colour and joviality, the general consensus among many is that they’re just... well boring. They make crowd pleasing anthems and nothing more. While I disagree heavily with such a statement, I can definitely see where a lot of the criticism comes from. I think the band have too. Their previous release ‘A Head Full of Dreams’ drew some ire for being too slick, too poppy, too suffocating. So here, on their next record, they’ve decided to spice things up
Despite being billed as a double album, ‘Everyday Life’ isn’t. It’s a single disc cut into two segments, named ‘Sunrise’ and ‘Sunset’ respectively. Both run a brisk 25ish minutes and both frequently jump genres and styles around, but they both share the same basic theme. The world has gone to hell and it needs fixing. As such, ‘Everyday Life’ is an angry album. A furious one even. From the rumbling afrobeat odyssey of ‘Arabesque’, where the band team up with Femi Kuti, to the slow-burning ‘Trouble in Town’, where Chris Martin’s vocals are filled with mourning and disgust. Coldplay have never been one to confront an issue directly, instead they offer a sort of shoulder to cry on in a sense. Their lyrics can be applied to any sort of topic and subject and make the listener feel understood. ‘The Scientist’ probably means a million different things to a million different people. ‘Everyday Life’, however, tackles the issues head on instead. The aforementioned ‘Trouble in Town’ is a bitter song, ruminating on police brutality and racism, tapped off with a hypnotic bass riff, ghostly distant guitar strums and an profanity laced audio recording of a case of police misconduct. It’s subtle and haunting and sums up the album’s overall tone and message incredibly well. ‘Guns’ is a brief country-blues track featuring just Chris and his guitar. Its paranoid and frantic pace feels like a bomb seconds away from detonation, aided by Martin’s stoney faced vocals. Elsewhere, the dreamy ballad ‘Daddy’ focuses on parental abandonment and the funky lead single ‘Orphans’ tells the tale of a father and daughter killed in the 2017 Syrian air strikes.
That’s not to say the album is all piss and vinegar mind. As usual, the group tap into their romantic, more universal side on songs like ‘Champion of the World’, the most ‘classic’ sounding of the songs here, and the folky pop of ‘Èkó’ and ‘Old Friends’. However, these songs themselves feel underdeveloped and rattled off. ‘Old Friends’ In particular, while quite a cute and soothing track, seems to end before it even starts. That’s where the main issue of the record is. It’s too scattershot. I appreciate the effort and message behind this LP but the main problem is that it doesn’t feel entirely finished in places. Despite running for 53 minutes (it’s their longest album since 2005’s ‘X&Y’), many of the songs here feel more like linking transitional tracks than full fleshed out pieces of music. The ‘sunset’ section of the album is particularly guilty of this, with 3 songs in a row running less than 3 minutes each. Now that’s not to say that a song has to be long and complex to be good, but these are all quite simplistic and rather basic songs. While I do get a kick out of ‘Cry Cry Cry’ and its weird pitch shifted RNB style, it tapers off before anything truly magical happens. Still, these aren’t bad songs, they’re just a little undercooked.
‘Everyday Life’ is debatably Coldplay’s strongest album in years. While it’s not as cohesive as ‘Ghost Stories’ or as active and jubilant as ‘A Head Full of Dreams’, the sheer range of genres the band have dipped their toes into (Gospel, afrobeat, trip-hop, hymns and spoken word to name a few) makes this album feel a lot more fresh and exciting than their previous three releases. True, it’s a little half-baked in places but the quality of the group’s performances (Special mentions to Guy Berryman who absolutely kills it here) and the much more mature and topical songwriting build towards a strong album with a few minor hiccups.
Standout tracks:
Church
Trouble In Town
BrokEn
Arabesque
Guns
Orphans
Everyday Life
