Click the audio player on the right to listen to Coldplay's "Mylo Xyloto"
Coldplay are geniuses. Their music isn’t genius, but the formula behind it is flawless; the fact that they are the highest-grossing band of the modern age proves it. On “Mylo Xyloto,” their fifth album, they are as they have ever been: Familiar from the first listen, blending sounds that represent both nostalgia and the zeitgeist, they are effortlessly easy to take in. The Coldplay palette is positively soothing, as is the certitude of their ubiquity. You needn’t buy “Mylo Xyloto” to hear it; it will come find you where you are: watching TV, shopping, driving or walking down the street. Coldplay is as dominant a product as any major brand, though it feels far less like knuckling under to give in to the band’s message.
And what is the message of “Mylo Xyloto”? Though Coldplay has been a band almost as long as Rihanna has been alive, they’ve got the pop-pep to keep up with the kiddos. The concept-story of “Mylo Xyloto” is inspired in part by the Nazi resistance youth movement, and while that sounds potentially strident and heavy, Martin & Co. give us a storyline as old as rock ’n’ roll itself: finding love and liberation in music. The Brian Eno-produced album starts out downright perky and works its way toward dark and expansive, with an arc of redemption at the end — no one likes an unhappy, unromantic ending. Martin might be anti- plenty of things, but he’s clearly as much a romantic sap as any anyone.
“Major Minor” gives good paranoia, mingling lines of subterfuge and lust — though when Martin sings “It’s us against the world / we just gotta turn up to be heard” he’s talking more Dance Dance Revolution than Arab Spring. Though Coldplay is known for being “political” — whatever that means for the biggest pop band in the world in 2011 — there isn’t a discernable platform of dissent here. “Mylo Xyloto” is essentially a new-wavey feel-good record about love amid the ruins. It’s written in the lingua franca of flawless chart pop: It’ll translate regardless of whether your version of a grim dystopia is your parents taking away your cellphone or the apocalypse that Martin conjures in “Up In Flames.”
Naturally, an album so ripe with destruction and swirling chaos must resolve with aphorisms of rebellion, reunion and rebirth — which is Coldplay’s specialty. They synthesize uplift and graft clichés, goading them into twinkling tunes of triumph with huge swells of guitar, danceable beats and “ooooh-oooh” choruses to sing along to. They are writing anticipating what works in a stadium full of screaming fans. “Paradise” showcases the band’s skill as assimilators — pop sponges swiping bulldozer synth lines from contemporary R&B and grand dynamics from their old standby, the U2 playbook, then updating them with a busy fury that’s downright Arcade Fire. They reconfigure it in all in such a way that it somehow becomes unmistakably Coldplay™.
The mission of “Mylo Xyloto” (or Coldplay) isn’t one of innovation. It’s about properly pushing the buttons of pop consumers, about making a record that’ll feel like it’s about your life whether you are in love or breaking up, about crafting songs that’ll sound good whether you’re hearing them fifth row center or in a Burger King bathroom. And it has succeeded — completely.
Coldplay are geniuses. Their music isn’t genius, but the formula behind it is flawless; the fact that they are the highest-grossing band of the modern age proves it. On “Mylo Xyloto,” their fifth album, they are as they have ever been: Familiar from the first listen, blending sounds that represent both nostalgia and the zeitgeist, they are effortlessly easy to take in. The Coldplay palette is positively soothing, as is the certitude of their ubiquity. You needn’t buy “Mylo Xyloto” to hear it; it will come find you where you are: watching TV, shopping, driving or walking down the street. Coldplay is as dominant a product as any major brand, though it feels far less like knuckling under to give in to the band’s message.
And what is the message of “Mylo Xyloto”? Though Coldplay has been a band almost as long as Rihanna has been alive, they’ve got the pop-pep to keep up with the kiddos. The concept-story of “Mylo Xyloto” is inspired in part by the Nazi resistance youth movement, and while that sounds potentially strident and heavy, Martin & Co. give us a storyline as old as rock ’n’ roll itself: finding love and liberation in music. The Brian Eno-produced album starts out downright perky and works its way toward dark and expansive, with an arc of redemption at the end — no one likes an unhappy, unromantic ending. Martin might be anti- plenty of things, but he’s clearly as much a romantic sap as any anyone.
“Major Minor” gives good paranoia, mingling lines of subterfuge and lust — though when Martin sings “It’s us against the world / we just gotta turn up to be heard” he’s talking more Dance Dance Revolution than Arab Spring. Though Coldplay is known for being “political” — whatever that means for the biggest pop band in the world in 2011 — there isn’t a discernable platform of dissent here. “Mylo Xyloto” is essentially a new-wavey feel-good record about love amid the ruins. It’s written in the lingua franca of flawless chart pop: It’ll translate regardless of whether your version of a grim dystopia is your parents taking away your cellphone or the apocalypse that Martin conjures in “Up In Flames.”
Naturally, an album so ripe with destruction and swirling chaos must resolve with aphorisms of rebellion, reunion and rebirth — which is Coldplay’s specialty. They synthesize uplift and graft clichés, goading them into twinkling tunes of triumph with huge swells of guitar, danceable beats and “ooooh-oooh” choruses to sing along to. They are writing anticipating what works in a stadium full of screaming fans. “Paradise” showcases the band’s skill as assimilators — pop sponges swiping bulldozer synth lines from contemporary R&B and grand dynamics from their old standby, the U2 playbook, then updating them with a busy fury that’s downright Arcade Fire. They reconfigure it in all in such a way that it somehow becomes unmistakably Coldplay™.
The mission of “Mylo Xyloto” (or Coldplay) isn’t one of innovation. It’s about properly pushing the buttons of pop consumers, about making a record that’ll feel like it’s about your life whether you are in love or breaking up, about crafting songs that’ll sound good whether you’re hearing them fifth row center or in a Burger King bathroom. And it has succeeded — completely.
