I know, I know, I take my life in my hands reviewing a Coldplay album around these parts, but, you know what, someone has to do it. (Narrator: No one has to do it). Anyway, I was a big fan of those first two Coldplay albums and I retain fond memories of them, though I haven’t heard them in more than a decade probably. X&Y really didn’t work for me and then they’ve only sporadically been interesting to me in the years since. This album is really quite something though. It seems like a very self-conscious effort at shaking things up stylistically and also just getting a little rougher around the edges. It’s a raw album and it’s also tonally inconsistent and sloppy, but in ways I found endearing. It is, however, even as it is often an album about being stripped down and sloppy, also a very pretentious album.
It is split into two halves: Sunrise & Sunset. It includes some of the band’s most pointed political lyrics and it is also, very explicitly, a search for God. It utilizes different styles of music from around the world and includes spoken word samples of everything from a cop’s profane racist tirade to Alice Coltrane talking about spirituality. It has a hidden “interlude” between the two halves of the record that is a thirty second recording of church bells; this thirty second recording is split into eight tracks and the titles of those eight tracks spell out “GOD=LOVE.” It is as genuinely experimental as the band has maybe ever been and it simultaneously feels like a very self-conscious effort to be “experimental.” But, you know what? I love it. I love this album in a way I haven’t loved a Coldplay album since Rush of Blood.
It's an album that has really alienated a lot of their fans, I guess, if you check out the internet discourse and I get why, because it only rarely sounds much like typical Coldplay. And it really is just all over the map, but a lot of the songs just really do work. I think the first half is overall stronger than the second. It’s got the album’s quietest, most emotionally devastating song, Daddy, which is a piano based lament just filled with sorrow. On the flip side of the piano-based tune, we’ve got just a piano and a black gospel choir backing up Chris Martin on BrokEn, a peppy, gospel tune. Arabesque is probably the best track on the album, a stomping epic with a bass riff that just won’t quit and a fantastic horn section, courtesy of Femi Kuti’s band. It’s the loudest, most rocking track on the record and then it’s followed up by When I Need a Friend, a really dark track inspired by Gregorian chant, I think, which I also really love. It’s just really gorgeous. Trouble in Town and WOTW/POTP are also really great tracks from the first half, the former an angry riff on police brutality and the latter a “work-in-progress” track that’s only about a minute and features Martin kind of hum-singing with his acoustic guitar to a song he obviously doesn’t have the lyrics finished for yet. Actually, I don’t know that those two really are great tracks, but I like them in context here, which is kind of how I feel about that church-bell interlude, I think. Best track on the second half is probably Cry Cry Cry, which has a faux vinyl crackle to go along with its interpolation of soul standard Cry, Baby. I also really liked the high-energy acoustic only Guns, which is a pretty angry mockery of the American fascination with guns.
Anyway, this album is sure to set your teeth on edge if you go to it looking for a typical Coldplay album. The moment when the most Coldplay-esque epic rock song so far, Arabesque, fades out and the choir chant comes in is probably the moment a million Coldplay fans angrily ripped their earbuds out of their ears. And the pretentiousness of a lot of the religious and social overtones will probably annoy you if you’re a dedicated Coldplay hater, as I know a lot of people around here are. But I’ve been trying to think about the last time I heard an album that was this consistently surprising. On the first listen, it only took about the first three or four tracks before I realized that I had NO idea what was going to happen next and that is an incredibly rare feat for an album. At a certain point, I would not have put it past the album to take a swerve into basically any style or topic and I found that feeling exhilarating. So, even though I didn’t love every song on this album, I think the album adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Some of the songs are great; others are just . . . different and by their very presence, they make the album better. This is true even of that short bell interlude. It’s been too long since I’ve listened to those first two Coldplay records, so I can’t really say that this is their greatest achievement or best album, but I do know that, twenty bloody years in, they surprised me and I’m pretty sure that makes it my favorite. 4 stars.
tl;dr – tonally scattered, raw, sloppy and inconsistent, this album is an exhilarating, constantly surprising experience and, if it isn’t the band’s best work, it’s more than the sum of its parts. 4 stars.