TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
AlbumReview: 'A Head Full of Dreams' by Coldplay
Earnestly crowd-pleasing and fame-embracing, Coldplay has never been cool
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Earnestly crowd-pleasing and fame-embracing, Coldplay has never been cool. Their breakout single, 'Yellow', had ruled with sticky-sweet embrace and fey sincerity and their subsequent climb to the top has been marked with one calculated commercialism after another; pop-star collaborations, arena-ready visual schticks and endless lines of lighter-baiting hit singles.
Their caliber of uncool takes a lot of marketing talent but it also rests heavily on being able to write actual songs ' catchy, heart-burning tracks that feel current.
As such, Coldplay's best-known songs seem to be written in the factory of surefire chart-toppers; identifiably theirs but also identifiably now. Coldplay may not be cool, but it is precisely because of this that they are one of the world's biggest bands.
Starting out as pensive Britpop indie kids trying to ape Jeff Buckley and radio-friendly Radiohead, the British quartet has, to date, consistently managed to fill stadiums by way of their chameleon transformation into a version of U2, Rihanna and whatever modern R'n'B calls itself at the moment.
Coldpay make music for the masses, with the sad-sack individuality of 2000's pensive 'Shiver' laid to rest in favor of the exploding soul fervor that makes up modern super-hits like 'Viva La Vida', 'Paradise', or 'Charlie Brown'. It is this careerist move that always favors the band, because the songs ' catchy melodies and soaring arrangements ' were always there.
On A Head Full of Dreams (Parlophone/ Atlantic Records), their latest record ' and if leader Chris Martin is to be believed, their swan song ' record, Coldplay have rummaged through an unsurprising amount of studio hit-making tricks to create some of the dullest songs in their catalog. Though their last few albums hinted at electronic-pop disco-dancing, Dreams takes that production trick to its extreme minus the songs to back it up. This is magically a Coldplay album without a tune to hum.
Produced with the assistance of Stargate, the production team who have worked with pop-stars Rihanna and Katy Perry, Dreams sets its disco foot right from the get go with its title track, which can be summed up as Coldplay-does-club-music ' echoing vocals from Martin, twinkly guitars from Johnny Buckland, and pulsating bass-lines, all layered with characterless electro drums and synth.
'Fun', an electro-pop (that term will come up a lot) ballad of similar characterless reproach featuring R'n'B star Tove Lo, is very-probably about Martin's recent divorce ('unconscious uncoupling' is the term) with actress Gwyneth Paltrow that sounds about as personal as that last hit you heard that you didn't really want to hear.
'Amazing Day' is futuristic rap that already sounds as dated in its futurist predication as early 1990s movies about 'duh Internet' and 'hackerz'.
The big single 'Adventure of a Lifetime' has some kind of hook, but you're never really sure whether it is just an unmistakable pattern that repeats itself endlessly like a drill through the teeth instead.
The album's best moment comes in the form of a leftfield interlude. 'Kaleidoscope' features a sample of Barack Obama singing 'Amazing Grace' and a voice reading out JalÄl ad-DÄ«n Muhammad RÅ«mÄ«'s The Guest House amidst layers of twinkling piano ambience.
Ghost Stories, Coldplay's previous album was written right after Martin's divorce and threaded inwards, almost ashamed in its own sense of unwillingness to connect with the masses. That was a real heartbreak record, regardless of how good/bad you considered the songs.
Dreams just sleepwalks through its populist chants of woohoos and empty platitudes with lyrics such as 'Everything you want's a dream away' and 'You make me feel like I'm alive again'.
A Head Full of Dreams is not a way for a world-renowned and much-embraced band to go out. It's a career nadir that perplexes, especially when coming from a band whose world-domination aspirations never before blanketed their ability to write very-strong populist pop. It is trite and simplistic to say a band 'used to be really good', but Coldplay's first two records rang with talent within the framework of punchy sentimentality.
Maybe if R'n'B hadn't ruled the airwaves for the past two decades, Chris Martin would still be writing U2-esque mega pop tunes to sell millions of records. This may sounds equally as trite and calculated, but if you are going to sell your soul for rock'n'roll, I'd say it is best to ape bands you sound good aping.
' Marcel Thee
