The End of a Fascination

Any album that (a) has a title which is nonsense, (b) prescribes its own pronunciation for said title (it’s ‘mylo zy-letoe’, apparently) and (c) unabashedly declares itself to be a concept album drawing on a wide range of seemingly powerful influences better be good. Unfortunately, the overwhelming feeling at the end of Coldplay’s fifth album is one of superficiality and of a band now utterly, irreconcilably adrift of the kind of music that made them great.

In keeping with the concept album feel, three of Mylo Xyloto’s fourteen tracks are sub-one minute interludes (one of them is even called ‘A Hopeful Transmission’, lest there be any doubt) and that is really where the problem begins—the ‘concept’ is of a ‘love story with a happy ending’ which (a) is battered into submission by Chris Martin’s alternately whooping and whining vocals and lazy lyrical imagery (‘Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall’ is referenced on ‘Paradise’ and ‘Us Against the World’ on ‘Major Minus’, all of which are painfully contrived from his bag of rainbow clichés) and (b) isn’t far removed from the majority of standard-issue Coldplay anyway.

With such a thin musical premise, the songs themselves need to deliver and, about halfway through ‘Paradise’ it dawns on you that this isn’t another experimental foray, this is what Coldplay is now—melody-driven power pop built for arenas, replete with ‘woah-oh’ choruses and a sea of shimmering synth sounds. In that sense, the last three years have not been a long journey at all—‘Paradise’ is the direct successor to ‘Viva La Vida’ from the previous album, much as ‘Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall’ is an aggrandized version of ‘Strawberry Swing’. Other indications of musical continuity with their own past are to be found on ‘Hurts Like Heaven’, ‘Don’t Let It Break Your Heart’ (almost laughably similar to ‘The Hardest Part’) and ‘U.F.O.’ (Martin’s oddly lumpy vocals literally run out of things to sing about roughly halfway through), but none of these transform the urgency and earnestness that have never been in doubt into anything remotely fresh or groundbreaking.

As expected, there are some bright spots but virtually all of them—the piano motif on ‘Charlie Brown’ (you’d think that if they wanted an instrumental track so bad, they’d have picked this) and the jagged guitars on ‘Major Minus’ in particular—speak more to Brian Eno’s influence on the album and, more worryingly, make them sound uncomfortably like U2. This isn’t a harking back to the good U2 of the late 80s/early 90s either (it’s worth keeping in mind that, going by the ‘jural correlative’ theory I use to force symmetry on everything, this ought to be Coldplay’s equivalent to Achtung Baby), this is pinching riffs to pass off as a sleek 2010s rebirth of U2-lite.

There is also more wholesome, heart-warming, echoing Coldplay goodness on ‘Us Against the World’, which features the full range of Martin’s voice and is as evocative as anything they’ve ever done but also as ‘cruelly magnolia’ (since that is the colour for the album) as anything they’ve ever done. Then there’s ‘Up in Flames’ (built around a very un-Coldplay-like sparse, decaying drumbeat) and ‘Up with the Birds’ (which closes the album full of the flashes and flares of shimmering sounds that dominate the previous thirteen tracks) which, again, suggest that there’s some really good music they could produce if they so choose but disappoint for precisely the reason that they choose not to.

As if to seal the discussion, there is a collaboration with Rihanna on ‘Princess of China’, which wouldn’t be out of place on a Rihanna album, such is the extent of Coldplay’s immersion in hook-laden, get-up-and-dance-pop (albeit with a sample pinched off Sigur Rós). It is smartly done, too—a genuine surprise on an album almost devoid of it.

And so ends my fascination with Coldplay—the band that has substituted imagination with electropop, the band which now opens at #1 on music charts around the world on the back of an album which doesn’t have a single song that can be properly identified with the smooth, emotive three-piece rock that brought them this far.