COLDPLAY: MUSIC OF THE SPHERES (PARLOPHONE)
The new album is so gushy that Neil Mccormick doesn’t know whether to reach for the Kleenex or a sick bucket
Music of the Spheres is the most Coldplay album Coldplay have ever made. How you feel about that may depend on your tolerance for Chris Martin’s apparently boundless energy and wide-eyed enthusiasm for big melodies and mushily vacuous sentiments.
It’s a giddy sugar rush of an album, as bright, shiny and colourful as a zero-gravity soft play area occupied by young lovers and puppy dogs. There are stadium anthems so rousing they make U2 sound like moody shoegazers, pop songs so cheesily cheerful they could make Paul Mccartney blush, and ballads so overwhelmingly gushy you won’t know whether to reach for the sick bag or the extra strong tissues. Probably both, to be on the safe side. And it is all wrapped up in an elaborately branded multi-media crossplatform conceptual framework purpose-built to infiltrate every possible commercial space on planet Earth.
Never mind that the concept of Music of the Spheres is comically naff, involving an imaginary solar system with each track corresponding to fictional celestial bodies with silly names like Supersolis, Epiphane, Kubik and Kaotica. Frontman and chief songwriter Martin claims to have been inspired by the alien cantina band from Star Wars and “wondering what musicians would be like across the universe”. It turns out that aliens mostly sound like they have been listening to K-pop and American Electronic Dance Music, or dabbling about in their space basements with Brian Eno’s old synthesizers, cobbling
If you are tolerant of Chris Martin, you will love this
together a few whooshy sounds and muttering phrases in a made-up language that Coldplay have dubbed Kaotican, and probably translates to “Will this do?”
Clever lyrics have never been Martin’s strong point, but some of these are particularly gauche, shoe-horning space references in wherever he sees an opportunity. “I loved you to the moon and back again,” croons Martin over a Seventies soft-rock style electric piano (yes, they have those in deep space too) on the tear-jerking duet Let Somebody Go. American actress-singer Selena Gomez offers a touching counterpoint to Professor Martin’s dubious mathematical formula that “love is only equal to the pain”. I mean, it’s not going to win him the Nobel Prize for Literature. But by the time it blends into artfully distorted choral Vocoder ballad Human Heart, you’d need to be made of tougher stuff than I to resist its emotional gravity.
Sentiment not sense has always been Martin’s strong suit, and he delivers every song with near-irresistible conviction. Such absolute commitment to melody and emotion allied with flashy sonic bedazzlement has helped make Coldplay the most popular rock band in the world, although I use the word rock in the loosest possible sense. Following 2019’s more experimental
Far out: Coldplay were apparently inspired by Star Wars’ alien cantina band
Everyday Life, their ninth album reasserts the British quartet’s grip on the mainstream pop pulse. My Universe offers a nauseatingly efficient super-brand crossover with Korean boy band BTS, while Swedish uber pop maestro Max Martin takes charge of the control board, to do for Coldplay what he did for Britney Spears, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry.
There have been many great sci-fi concept albums before, but Coldplay’s offering is not so much about exploring the outer limits as continued world domination.