Brave try, but not an immaculate conception

REVIEW

Coldplay, Everyday Life Parlophone

THEY’RE trying. You do have to give them that. There’s a point at which being a megaband takes on a momentum of its own, like a jumbo jet or a supertanker, and the music itself can only follow in the slipstream.

Within those relatively narrow parameters, Coldplay – one of the few acts whose worldwide sales in the streaming age still reliably clock up multiple millions – have done their best to make Everyday Life a varied and inventive thing.

This is a concept album of sorts, a double set (albeit under an hour) split into two halves – Sunrise and Sunset – and aspiring to an international vision, with songs that double as impressionistic snapshots of people, places and events around the world.

Which will be familiar enough to fans of U2, creators of the megaband blueprint. But where 2015’s A Head Full Of Dreams sounded closely akin to the Irish band, Everyday Life tends more towards the glossy, monumental global rock that first Peter Gabriel and then Paul Simon brought to the mainstream.

The trouble is, Coldplay still can’t help being Coldplay. They haven’t Gabriel’s left-field instincts, nor

Simon’s illuminating way with a lyric. They haven’t, in short, much to add.

For every Arabesque, with its swaying Afro-pop shuffle and horns by Femi Kuti, or lilting nearinstrumental Bani Adam, there are drab forays into gospel, old-fashioned R&B, Pink Floyd-ish glumness, subRedemption Song Bob Marley-ism.

Which is not to say Coldplay shouldn’t attempt these things (bar the last, which nobody should) – only that the attempts don’t come off. There’s a wise aphorism about travel and the self: wherever you go, there you are. For Coldplay, it’s a musical truth.