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“Let Somebody Go” with Gomez, while pleasant, lacks originality, and the presence of We Are KING alongside Jacob Collier on “❤️” feels rather left-field, especially when Collier’s input seems mostly for backing vocals and arrangement on a vastly empty song of layered choral vocals – coming off as more of a hymn than a song.
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“Biutyful” gets an honourable mention, as it really embodies the feeling of space and heavenly bodies through its production and arrangement.įeaturing big names like Selena Gomez and BTS is one thing, and taking on prodigy Jacob Collier for a track is a sensible move to progress Coldplay into the modern music landscape - however, the features feel like an afterthought when they aren’t utilised properly. There are some bright stars in the mix, and singles “Higher Power” and the collaboration with Korean superstars BTS on “My Universe” stand out in the crowd, and not just by a little, but by a country mile - they have a dynamic structure and style and feel like the fully fledged songs that Coldplay have become synonymous with. It’s sad then that as you get your teeth into it, it fails to lift off. Employing the vastness of space and celestial alignment in their artwork and ideas, the album has a sense of epic-ness to it on paper. It’s a band whose great talent has always been its aspirational one-world melodies, now sounding much more like the world.Coldplay love their grandeur concepts that venture into the ethereal, and Music Of The Spheres is no different. The masterstroke is the single “Orphans,” conjuring a generation of refugees in a barroom-singalong, with a bassline recalling Bakithi Kumalo’s pulse on Paul Simon’s Graceland, and a reprise so redolent of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” it’s almost a “have your lawyers call our lawyers” mash note. The bloody “Trouble in Town,” with an African choir invoking Nelson Mandela and a harrowing 2013 audio clip of Philadelphia police officer Philip Nace terrorizing a man during a traffic stop, recalls Peter Gabriel’s “Biko.” Yet these feel more like tributes than ripoffs. “WOTW/POTP,” with its echoes of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” suggests a lo-fi demo captured in a Trenchtown yard with birds twittering overhead (actually recorded, it seems, at Electric Ladyland in Manhattan). (It’s worth noting that the band will donate what one presumes will be significant royalties from a couple of songs to support both the Innocence Project and the African Children’s Feeding Scheme.)Īs ever, they’re good students, sometimes to a fault. It’s a good team: what might come off as a virtue-signaling kludge instead, at its best, transforms the band’s faintly imperial universalism into a diverse, collective one.
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Yoking it all together is longtime Coldplay production wingman Rik Simpson and hitmaking Norwegian chrome-platers Stargate, who helped sculpt A Head Full of Dreams. “Bani Adam” (titled in its Arabic rendering, “بنی آدم”) combines Romantic piano, Persian poetry ( Saadi), and West African church music. Instead of just attempting to absorb afrobeat, Coldplay enlists a cross-section of the Fela Kuti dynasty - son Femi, grandson Made, and a sample of Fela himself - on the swaggering “Arabesque,” while rapper-singer Stromae drops French verses for good measure. Here, the music is both more eclectic and more unified. The record’s multiculturalism certainly recalls Viva la Vida, the band’s vaguely non-committal 2008 meet-up with art-rock swami Brian Eno. The Best Audiophile Turntables for Your Home Audio System
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He even sings conjugations of the word “fuck.” Yes, he sounds very polite doing it, of course. But the sentiments here have never been so specific. The band’s been judiciously political since Martin was scrawling “MAKE TRADE FAIR” on his hand. There are choirs, orchestral strings and an Alice Coltrane sample interpolations of the Janis Joplin signature “Cry Baby,” and late Scottish indie-rocker Scott Hutchison’s “Los Angeles, Be Kind.” Lyrics and soundbites address racism, police violence, gun proliferation, and Syria missile strikes. Signifying ambition as in days of yore, Everyday Life is a double studio LP it’s Coldplay’s rangiest and deepest release by orders of magnitude, maybe even their best.ĭivided into halves titled (wait for it) “Sunrise” and “Sunset,” the band taps into storefront gospel, Nigerian afrobeat, and Sufi qawwali music. This is positive: when Ed Sheeran becomes your gold standard, it would seem time for a rethink. After their platinum 2015 pop-pivot A Head Full of Dreams, an all-star Super Bowl halftime show and a two-year big-box tour that shifted $523 million in tickets, easy-listening rock champs Coldplay release an album that aspires to more than stadium-packing.