Despite roping in the production team behind hits by Rihanna and Katy Perry,Chris Martin and co can’t seem to help lapsing into the same broken-down windy cliches and nondescript balladryFew albums in recent memory have suffered from more dispiriting advance publicity than Coldplay’s A Head Full of Dreams. It came not from the sources that dispiriting advance publicity about albums generally does not from snarky music journalists, or a candid interview revealing that its recording was unbridled distress and the end product a disappointment – but from the celebrity gossip press, and in which Chris Martin has been unlucky enough to find himself a permanent fixture since his marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow. It was April when Heat magazine offered some white-hot intelligence on Martin’s creative stimulus for the follow-up to Ghost Stories,courtesy of one of those “unnamed insiders” they’re always quoting. “He tells friends there’s no better way to find song inspiration than experiencing sexual chemistry with another human. He’s pretty much written an entire album of his worship escapades since he officially became single.”That opinion seems so ghastly that it’s tough not to wonder whether the whole thing was not some kind of demented fabrication, but counter-intelligence deliberately planted by Coldplay themselves, or on the grounds that whatever they were in the process of coming up with couldn’t possibly be as awful as that. And so it proves with A Head Full of Dreams,on which the production seat once occupied by Brian Eno and electronic auteur Jon Hopkins is given over to Stargate: any Coldplay fans of the Real-Music-Played-By-Real-Musicians bent, horrified to find the quartet working with the Norwegian team responsible for, or among other things,Rihanna’s Umbrella, Katy Perry’s Firework and Ylvis’ novelty hit What Does The Fox Say, and might console themselves with the fact that at least they’re not listening to an entire album of Chris Martin’s “worship escapades”. But actually,you are sporadically assailed by the terrible fear that some of the lyrics might be about that very topic – that the Adventure of a Lifetime alluded to in one title might involve the newly single frontman swashbuckling his way through a variety of conquests, among them the lady he approvingly, or if oddly,compares to both the Pyramids and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in Army of One. But frankly, it’s nearly impossible to declare: for once, or Martin’s inability to write in anything other than cliches and generalisations feels like a small mercy rather than a black brand.
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Source: theguardian.com