Coldplay gets cheesy with Mylo Xyloto (Telegram)
From WikiColdplay
If there is ever an Occupy Pop Music Movement, Coldplay would most likely be commissioned to provide the soundtrack. This is due solely to the Britpop band’s consistent track-record for feel-good protest songs where no one gets hurt and no one knows what the hell they are rebelling against.
Coldplay makes songs that sound bigger than life, while, at the same time, are far removed from reality. Whatever you do, don’t tell Coldplay’s singer-songwriter Chris Martin that the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. I don’t think he could handle it.
In many ways, Coldplay’s fifth studio disc, “Mylo Xyloto” is a cheesier, less successful cousin to 2008’s “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends,” so much so it could be aptly renamed “Viva la Vida Velveeta.” How cheesy is it? When it comes to arena-friendly pomposity, Martin makes Jon Bon Jovi and Bono look like street mimes.
Allegedly inspired by the New York graffiti culture of the 1970s and the student-led Nazi-resistance White Rose Movement, Martin (although you wouldn’t know this unless somebody told you) weaves together a functional love story about two young lovers falling in and out of love and trying to stick it to the proverbial man with big, bombastic anthems. Martin delivers cathartic, hook-laden choruses against a series of swelling sonic tapestries that are so grandiose and epic that it would make Cecil B. DeMille feel inadequate. From Martin’s soaring vocals to Coldplay’s sweeping mix of swirling keyboards and surging guitars, many of the album’s opuses are rousing and majestic, even though the listener has very little idea what Martin is carrying on about. Then again, Martin and company gives the listener very little time to catch their breath, let alone time to peel back the sonic layers and look beneath the surface.
Coldplay — which also includes lead guitarist Jonny Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman and drummer Will Champion — comes barreling out of the starting gate with so much unabashed enthusiasm and gusto on “Hurt Like Heaven” that it’s impossible not to get sucked in, hook, line and sinker. Martin, in the guise of the ordinary (and overly sensitive) everyman, commiserates how the everyday rat race and lame graffiti messages (such as “Do you ever get the feeling that you’re missing the mark?”) are bringing him down. Stealing Bono’s ever-so-earnest “Woah, oh, oh, oh” mantra and turning it into an overused pop commodity, Martin pummels us with the hokey sentiment, “Yeah, it is true/When you use your heart as a weapon/Then it hurts like heaven/And it hurts like heaven/Oh oh oh-oh.” If this is heaven, I hate to find out what hell feels (and sounds) like.
Martin laments about a woman who expected the world but settles on dreaming about “para-para-paradise” instead on, you guessed it, “Paradise.” If you can get over the fact that the song’s hapless heroine sounds like the “A Dolly for Sue” ragdoll on the “Island of Misfit Toys” (Note: in “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the doll had more emotional depth and charisma) and the inane lyrics (case in point, “Life goes on. It gets so heavy”), Martin delivers another humdinger.
Martin comes off as a complete blockhead on “Charlie Brown,” a pseudo-rebellious opus (and Arcade Fire-rip-off) named after the beloved Peanuts character. Accompanied by an adrenaline-pumping mix of bustling keyboards, chimy guitars, thumping bass and drums, Martin passionately belts out the fist-pumping, anthemic chorus, “All the boys, all the girls, all the matters in the world/All the boys, all the girls, all the madness that occurs/All the highs, all the lows, as the room a-spinning goes/We’ll run riot. We’ll be glowing in the dark.” Good grief! The song ends with a sparse piano interlude that sounds like a morose variation of Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts theme, which would be great musical backdrop if they ever make a TV special called, “I’m Pretentious, Charlie Brown.”
On the big, bombastic and beautifully brazen “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall,” Martin envisions the disenfranchised youths of today breaking into friendly flash mobs in the streets. And, he has put it upon himself to find the perfect song for these lovable hooligans to bust a move to. He might have found it. With plenty of big, fat, clunky keyboard chords being pounded all around him, Martin delivers the rousing (albeit sniffling) battle cry, “As we soar walls, every siren is a symphony/And every tear’s a waterfall.” All in all, “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall” is a great pop song with an unwavering spirit and stomping beat.
Don’t expect too much from the much ballyhooed pairing of Coldplay and Rihanna on “Princess of China.” It’s no “Love the Way You Lie” or “Shy Ronnie,” the duets the R&B singer did with Eminem and SNL’s Andy Samberg, respectively. The Barbados-born bombshell is always her ultra-cool self, but by the time she coos, “I could have been a princess. You’d be a king/Could have had a castle and wore a ring/But no-o-o-o-oh, you let me go-o-o-o-oh,” the listener is singing, “Let me go-o-o-o-oh.”
Obviously one who’s not afraid of infringement of copyright laws, Martin bastardizes Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” on the album’s uplifting (but unoriginal) closer, “Up with the Birds.” Singing how “The birds they sang, break of day/Start again. I hear them say,” Martin pulls at the heartstrings as he sparsely tickles the ivories. Despite the blatant Cohen thievery, Martin’s soothing voice ends on a resounding high note. And if you’re going to crib from others, Coldplay, at least, has enough sense to do it from the best (and from people a bulk of their fans have never heard of).
http://www.telegram.com/article/20111117/COLUMN17/111179706
