Recently, Chris Martin’s band, Coldplay, hinted that they plan to cap their musical career with 12 albums in total. This revelation puts a lot of pressure on them to finish with a bang, considering their incredible success since their first album, Parachutes, premiered in 2000. However, their 10th album hits the ground with more of a muted impact rather than a resounding splash.
The title of their recent work, Moon Music, is ambitious to say the least, but no one would be surprised if Coldplay went on to be the first band to perform on a celestial body. Arguably, ‘Celestial Music’ could have been a more fitting title, given the sprinkling of heavenly references in their lyrics.
Their latest album has fittingly been dubbed the “Hollywood blockbuster”, not just because of its exorbitant cost, credited to a £35 million advance, but also due to the galaxy of talent behind its production. Led by pop maestro, Max Martin, the cast of sound engineers and musicians is so formidable that even contributions from Nile Rodgers and Brian Eno went unremarked in the press release.
Despite their commendable initiatives to lower CO2 emissions and pledge 10% of their tour profits to charitable causes, it would be tempting to approach this album with a sense of cynicism. As the global reputation of Coldplay has skyrocketed, there has been a noticeable surge in their emotional sincerity, which some argue has come at the cost of their overall musical contribution. The album Moon Music is no exception, with the opening lyrics expressing a struggle to trust in a world filled with love, and concluding on an idealistic note with the closing song, One World, emphasizing the power of love in the end.
The Moon Music album consists predominantly of superficial, sugary songs on relationships like All My Love and feelslikeimfallinginlove; self-confidence tunes such as iAAM (an acronym for ‘I am a Mountain’); and a feeble attempt at making a protest song with ‘We Pray’. There’s also a track employing a rainbow emoji as its name, known as Alien Hits/Alien Radio, which is as unbearably pretentious as you’d imagine.
However, amid the bland composite of Moon Music, there are some saving graces such as the catchy pop track Good Feelings – a collaboration with the young Nigerian artist, Arya Starr – and Jupiter, a stripped-down acoustic melody about a lonely LGBT girl with its sincere chorus, ‘I love who I love’.
Despite these glimpses of redemption, the album largely appears to be designed with large crowds and instant mass appeal in mind. The lyrics exhibit more focus on immediate connexion and mass participation than depth and sophistication. Coldplay has two albums left to regain some of its independent validity. Whether they can achieve this is questionable, although it’s plausible that Martin and his fellow band members have stopped concerning themselves with this.