Album of the Week: Everyday Life — Coldplay
Coldplay’s latest album proves that any band can pull themselves out of the rut of musical stagnation. Edbenjsmith explains how they’ve managed it.
Coldplay have always occupied a very strange crossroads in pop culture. They are quintessentially British, a staple of British music, performing at the diamond jubilee in 2012. However, for all their success they are undoubtedly hated by the public. It’s very hard to pin down why — maybe its Chris Martin’s un-British cheeriness, or that their changes in sound seem more to be selling out than anything else. Their last hit single, ‘Something Just Like This’, collaborates with the Chainsmokers (a band which, like the name suggests, is a cancer on popular music) and is the closest Coldplay have come to deserving the disdain that the public have for them; a sugary sweet, dancefloor-ready track.
Their second album A Rush of Blood to the Head, is possibly one of the best albums of all time, and deserves all the praise it gets. Yet they have spent the second half of their career distancing themselves from it as much as possible, epitomised on their last album A Head Full of Dreams, which is a straight pop record and has paved the way for further explorations into disposable, inoffensive chart anthems. This is why this new album ‘Everyday life’ is out of left field.
In brief, I love this album. While, yes, it is incredibly flawed and has some dud tracks, but from a band which is seemingly all out of ideas, this album is jam packed with them. It is easily their best albums since Viva La Vida, and whilst this might not seem like high praise, this album definitely ranks among their best.
After being greeted by the dreamy violin swells on the introductory track ‘Sunrise’, this album hits you with the one-two punch of ‘Church’ and ‘Trouble in town’. Whilst not upbeat or chart-worthy by any means, these are possibly some of the best Coldplay songs ever recorded. They are incredibly beautiful — on the latter, ‘Trouble in Town’, Chris Martin croons over some beautiful backing instrumentation and a thumping drumbeat, which just simmers in the background. It occupies a position between being peaceful yet having enough tension to explode into something brilliant and bombastic, which it certainly does. It takes on a jazz infused breakdown with seemingly thousands of horns erupting into tightly controlled chaos over perfectly mixed guitars and drums, creating a moment that makes the case that they wouldn’t do too bad a job writing the next Bond theme.
The vocals in the interlude of this track are very un-Coldplay, with an audio recording of police brutality, which does admittedly fit in with the theme of the track. However, it sounds more fitting for a Kendrick Lamar or $uicideboy$ record. While it is a slightly jarring choice, it is commendable merely for trying something new and interesting.
It’s also at this instance that we are treated to the word ‘fuck’. While this may seem fairly petty, it really is not. This album contains the first ever explicit Coldplay songs, a band twenty-three years into their career. It’s an interesting change just by the act of holding off for so long. I see it as the band throwing everything they can into making something new, even if it means abandoning their long held principles.
There are many odd interludes here which fit with their old-timey gimmick, such as the stripped back piano-based gospel on ‘BroKen’, the folksy murmurings of ‘WOTW/POTP’ and the Chopin-esque piano ballad on ‘Bani Adam’. These do a good job of pulling together the theme of the album, even if they do sometimes seem to be half-baked experimentations.
Chris Martin’s song writing does leave a lot to be desired, with clunky lyrics scattered all across this record, with ‘Daddy’ and ‘Champion of the World’ being two of the greatest offenders. The former compensates by being devastatingly beautiful, with its cheesy lyrics making sense as they are supposed to come from the mind of a young girl, the same isn’t true for the latter.
The two lead singles of this album ‘Arabesque’ and ‘Orphans’ are the most straightforward songs of the album. However, the former compensates by going the extra mile, with the blaring horns, funky guitar lines and an extended trumpet solo. ‘Orphans’, however, sounds exactly like a Mylo Xyloto b-side. It suffers from a lack of ideas whilst being far more upbeat than the rest of the album, rendering it an unusual musical detour for an album full of unusual musical detours, with nothing to show for it.
The final track ‘Everyday Life’ is a throwback to their mid-2000s work, almost like a finale to a trilogy, starting with ‘Clocks’ and continuing with ‘Speed of Sound’. The piano part is gut-wrenchingly sad and occasional violin flourishes are in just the right places to elevate this track. While the lyrics have not been spared from Chris Martin’s brand of fake-deep-while-saying-nothing-at-all, such as ‘everyone hurts, everyone cries, everyone sees the colour in each other’s eyes’, the instrumentation makes up for the punch that the lyrics lack, a fact that seems to hold through throughout most of this project.
The real tragedy of this album is that they finally seem destined for irrelevance, despite being some of their best work they have stopped their chart chasing that has embodied the last decade of their career. This is the first time in ages that they haven’t sounded two ‘woah woahs’ away from donning matching haircuts and starting a boyband. This album is a few tricks short of a triumph, but it doesn’t half make for a great listen. Chris Martins less-is-better approach to piano playing does wonders throughout this album, usually at the forefront, almost acting as a conductor for the sweeping orchestral instrumentation. The melding of current politics against a decidedly old-timey sounding record highlights an interesting point about how little attitudes have truly changed over the last 100 years. 1919 was the beginning of the rise of populism which led to the election of Hitler, a worry that is echoed very strongly today, and drawing parallels between these two time periods on the album makes this uncomfortably clear.
Though scoring records isn’t really the way URY does things, I’m still going to say that it lies somewhere in the vicinity of 7.7 to 7.9 out of 10. It’s just nice to know that Britain’s biggest musical artists are now artists again.
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