album review: 'music of the spheres' by coldplay

I mean, at this point, what more do I even need to say?

At this point, you know my roots with this band - I’ve been reviewing them in video form since 2014 and actually drafted a review of Mylo Xyloto on Facebook back in 2011 to try and figure out what the hell happened with that project; to this day, I’m still not sure I’ve got a coherent answer. But in the decade since that album, breaking down what Coldplay even is anymore is both fascinating and deeply depressing, especially as someone who was a fan - hell, one of the reasons I broke down their discography with my colleague Luke over on his channel Rocked was trying to pinpoint where everything flew off the rails… or if it even did.

And finally, I think I’ve pinpointed the major issue: Coldplay and especially their frontman Chris Martin are profoundly earnest in their delivery and sentiments and you can tell that they’ve at least got their hearts in the right place… but at some point they lost the plot in execution and it’s hard to escape a feeling of deep-seated cynicism with their sound that creates a profound clash. There are other issues - the departure of Brian Eno from the production boards to be replaced with a boat-load of pop collaborators with extremely mixed results, the abandonment of their guitar foundations, the fact that the songwriting remains as broadly sketched and hit-and-miss as their heyday - but ever since A Head Full of Dreams, and you could argue Mylo Xyloto with the Rihanna collaboration, it you wanted to frame Coldplay as an overly sentimental, corporatized band… well, it’s hard to argue against that. But even then, I don’t think that’s the full story, because if they were fully corporate they wouldn’t have put out the genre-blurring disaster that was Everyday Life in late 2019, which felt like Coldplay was trying to make more resonant cultural statements, even if they felt flimsy or badly misguided - and even then, I’ve seen folks argue that it was just playing for the Grammy nomination it eventually got.

Now it is worth mentioning that Everyday Life while selling well didn’t come close to meeting any sort of sales expectation in comparison with their previous projects - I could argue some of that was bad promotion and a bad album but it also didn’t have radio singles, so you can tell that their label was going to fix that for their next album, Music Of The Spheres. And hey, the singles charted - thanks to BTS they got their first #1 in over a decade - and all of that buzz was enough for me to think this was worth a solo review, even if I had the long, sinking feeling this would just be another pop concession riding on the unquenchable earnestness of Chris Martin to sell it. But hey, at least Jon Hopkins was back to help with production, and I didn’t hate any of the singles, and with Max Martin cowriting every track, it couldn’t be worse than Everyday Life, right?

So I’m going to start this review with a contentious statement: at this point, how you review Coldplay, especially a Coldplay album like this, says a lot more about you than it does Coldplay themselves. Because Coldplay is basic in both the pejorative, silent-majority act dismissal but also in their thematic and emotional approach - and for about twenty years, it hasn’t really changed. Yeah, there’s been peaks and valleys within it, where the situations described might trend darker or melancholic, but I remember when Coldplay was getting reviewed in the late 90s and early 2000s and reading the reviews now in 2021, it’s startling how little has changed. The rock band that has been perpetually uncool but for the one moment they got a little darker and rougher on Viva La Vida and got real critical acclaim from all the disaffected types too good for this band, swap out rock for pop nowadays and the copy writes itself - Gen X irony and cynicism translating to Gen Z irony and cynicism, we’ve been here before. And yes, for everything surrounding this album, I get why that attitude makes sense, and why they would want to bring up questions of underperformance - although it’s telling to see it from a mainstream music press who normally likes to ‘just stick to the music’ - but I think I need to take a different tactic… because I think this is Coldplay’s best album since Mylo Xyloto, comfortably their best pop experiment and one that has a level of emotional honesty that I didn’t expect to hear. It absolutely has problems and it’s not near their glory years, but I’m not going to do a hatchet job on an album I think is better than many will give it credit.

And to explain why, I want to bring up an essay written back in 2013 on Gawker called On Smarm by Tom Scocca, which was a lengthy dissection of the anti-critical, generally pro-establishment rhetoric that surrounds certain writing discourse. To paraphrase, smarm is performative seriousness and virtue and earnestness that asks why we all can’t be nicer, or if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all - what’s key to note is that it’s artificial, an indifference to truth in order to preserve a veneer, a neoliberal civility. And now there’s a part of me that’s legit shocked Coldplay doesn’t get hit with that descriptor more often, especially with the rollout of this album and its much-noted collaborations and mixed-to-negative reviews, but I also think I know why: art is not beholden to objective standards that smarm would paint over, and it’s not a label that really fits Chris Martin, who would have every excuse to phone it in at this point and he doesn’t on this album. That was my big issue with A Head Full Of Dreams, where it sounded like Martin was checked out and the pop grooves going for insubstantial rollicking cool felt so off to me - which feeds into why ‘Higher Power’ is still not as good as it should be, even if it has grown on me since, because I think Chris Martin needed a full song to charge his batteries and get engaged. But Coldplay are schmaltzy and corny to a fault; they aren’t cool, and trying to force cool felt really sour, and it’s also the reason why despite thinking Everyday Life is a disaster, it doesn’t feel inauthentic to what the band is trying to do - badly miscalculated and placing them way out of their depth, but it was more toothless rather than cynical or calculating. Hell, when Chris Martin worked with the goddamn Chainsmokers on ‘Something Just Like This’, the reason that song works at all is because he wholeheartedly believes what he’s selling, and comes across like the guy who’d be thrilled to work with Selena Gomez or Jacob Collier or BTS in a goofy, loosely conceptual sci-fi yarn with the thinnest possible ‘music saves humanity’ plotline. But that earnestness does not work for everyone and you need to buy into it - it’s why a detached Rihanna made no sense on ‘Princess Of China’, and when I look at the guests here… yeah, Parlophone and Atlantic are counting the sales, it would have every reason to feel like a cash grab, but everyone here sounds like they care or bought in, which is why this doesn’t feel cynical or smarmy to me. Both BTS and Selena Gomez fit in this space really well, and no jokes, I think Jacob Collier and We Are King sound excellent on the a capella ‘♡ (Human Heart)’, especially Collier who doesn’t have to force a groove and can leverage his melodic impulses into something that fits him, and the vocal arrangement really shows that off.

That said, I absolutely get the audience that wouldn’t buy into this - any album that’s attempting to sell ‘space’ to a mainstream audience even one more accustomed to sci-fi is asking for backlash, and where I get some making parallels to the Star Wars prequels for its goofy sentimentality and how amazingly dumb it is, even if I’d argue it’s more simplistic rather than stupid. Now this is where I could also highlight how Coldplay has never been that deep - which was a huge criticism of them in rock early on that felt conspicuously applied - and how some critics are very telling where they choose to draw lines on depth in music, but this is also an album that gives up its cards very early. Martin has said this album boils down to two main thematic statements: ‘everyone is an alien somewhere’, and ‘we’re all one in the universe’, where the lyrics of the ‘villain song’ ‘People of the Pride’ are leftovers from Viva La Vida, and the album is aiming to try and make the cosmic feel intimate and the intimate feel cosmic… which funnily enough is pretty much the exact thematic juxtaposition that this band has always worked since the very beginning! And while I know I’m a sucker for sci-fi, I actually think that these sorts of broad, space-themed metaphors are a great fit for Coldplay - it doesn’t anchor them to real life scenes that will expose how flimsy this all could feel, it allows them to go for broad strokes and play big, but also capture the intimacy of feeling alone and staring up at the vast cosmos, bring out that wistful yearning. That’s one reason why I buy into the emotional honesty of an album like this - this is the sort of broad, come-together material that Coldplay has made their own time and time again, and prising forth universal feelings of vulnerability, fear, feeling small in a vast space but finding connections across the distance… yeah, it’s not as good as when The Avalanches did last year with a lot of similar language, but it’s got the same emotional core.

But hey, execution matters just as much - and where I will say that if you’re still hoping for Coldplay to deliver rock songs, you’re going to be left wanting, and if I have a major criticism, it’d be that some added epic rock swell could have knocked this out of the park beyond the underpowered ambient interludes and ‘∞ (Infinity Sign)’ going for a soccer chant the majority of its runtime. Instead, a lot of these arrangements can feel a bit overpolished, a little underpowered, most notable on ‘People of the Pride’ that had to give a sampling credit to Sam Sparro for ‘Black And Gold’ but basically sounds like Coldplay trying to remake Muse’s ‘Uprising’ and not succeeding, even if I still like the track for having more swagger than Coldplay should have ever been allowed to get away with. No, the song that lost me was ‘Biutyful’, where half of the mix Chris Martin is crooning opposite a pitched-up voice that got aggressively irritating, feeling just as cloying as the worst parts of Everyday Life. But more than ever you can tell that in order to ensure the hooks exploded as sharply as they could, Max Martin was going to have to do some heavy lifting to punch up the glittery mixes full of Jon Hopkins on keyboards, more smoothly integrate the grooves into Coldplay’s sound while make the mixes sound as big as they could without Brian Eno to lend his magic… and I’d be damned if he doesn’t make it work on the few full tracks he gets! Part of this is that he seems to get that a sense of scope and melodic crescendos are Coldplay’s biggest assets - and even then, I really wish he would have left the percussion to Will Champion and not add in the clunky pop drum machines. But the breathless, choppy acoustics that blast across the bass gallop of ‘Humankind’, the buzzy synth splashes of ‘My Universe’, the piano and guitar interplay across the fluttery ‘∞ (Infinity Sign)’, and of course, ‘Coloratura’, the epic ten minute suite that ends the album with the longest song in Coldplay’s catalog. And this is where I would argue this album’s promotion did it no favours, as this was released alongside the other early singles and when you take that, the other singles, and the ambient pieces off the album, this project starts feeling extremely thin, and for a space-themed project probably should have had a lot more material instead of being damn near Coldplay’s shortest album. But ‘Coloratura’ is Coldplay making a sweeping progressive pop rock suite and while, again, I think it could have exploded more if it leaned on rock elements beyond a very welcome solo… for this sort of keyboard-driven synthpop, I was able to buy in, and it worked.

And I think that’s important to highlight with Music Of The Spheres, because for the past decade I’ve been hunting for the Coldplay album that ‘works’ for me, and I’ve struggled to find it, especially in comparison with their 2000s output. I didn’t expect it would be this album, and truth be told, I don’t think this is great either - it’s certainly pretty but it feels underpowered and not willing to fully embrace the scope of its concept, and if you’ve already heard the singles and promotional material, I get why some might be wondering if this was it. And yeah, I get the folks who heard the pop focus and the choice of guest stars and thought, ‘Head Full Of Dreams round 2, Coldplay sell out again now with BTS’ - it’s certainly how the label is treating it. But maybe it’s the concept, maybe it’s how Chris Martin sounds engaged again, maybe it’s how Coldplay’s earnest optimism rekindles some of that vintage space age charm, maybe it’s how this concept maps so seamlessly onto their broad, baseline appeal, or hell, maybe it’s having some of their best hooks in years, but I think this is a good album. It’s not a great one, which is why I’m giving this a solid 6/10, but for the first time in about a decade, Coldplay recaptured some of the magic for me. For that, I’ll give them credit.