Coldplay, Moon Music review: Chris Martin mangles his metaphors on a suffocatingly banal album about love

When did the tide turn on Coldplay? Over the past decade, the British band have gone from national whipping boy, sneered at for their edgeless brand of anthemic pop-rock, to re-ascendant bastions of the industry. When the Chris Martin-fronted outfit headlined Glastonbury earlier this year for the fifth time, it was hailed as a triumph. But the Coldplay Live Show Experience™ is one thing, girdled as it is by deft gimmickry (surprise guests, light-up wristbands, and a hi-tech laser display that would make George Lucas baulk). Their new album Moon Music, however, offers no dazzling light show. It’s just music and lyrics. And that’s a problem.

Somehow indulgent and featherlight at once, Coldplay’s 10-track ode to the Unifying Power of Love feels like psychedelia as imagined by a man whose drug of choice is vanilla extract. Songs are lyrically underwritten, pretentiously packaged, and too often bookended by stretches of lilting, soporific ambience. Such is the case on “MOON MUSiC”, a pleasantly ethereal Jon Hopkins collaboration that yields to some jingly arpeggiated piano and soft, low singing – gently scraping on the concrete beneath Martin’s vocal comfort zone.

Martin’s voice is sharper on “feelslikeimfallinginlove” – one of the album’s better songs, and exactly the kind of serotonin-pumped pop that Coldplay have aced in the past. But there’s no getting around the banality of the lyrics, those threadbare clichés and clunky turns of phrase (“Baby, it’s my mind you blow”). The call-and-response bridge section sees Martin fill out his melody with a full line of “La’s” – something he does repeatedly across the record. Elsewhere, “We Pray” incorporates “Viva La Vida”-esque strings alongside an overbearing glut of featured artists: Little Simz; Burna Boy, Palestinian-Chilean musician Elyanna, and Argentinian singer Tini.

Other tracks fare even worse, platitudinously reiterating one very basic theme: ain’t love grand? “All the good good feelings/ Don’t ever let them go,” Martin sings ad nauseam on the funky and uptempo “GOOD FEELiNGS”. A track titled “iAAM” strains for that stadium-ready sound, but, in its melodious, slightly syncopated chorus, makes chop suey of its metaphors: “Stood on a sea of pain/ Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain/ I’ll be back on my feet again/ ‘cause I am a mountain.” Standing on a sea? Mountains with feet? What do you mean you’re “back on your feet” when you’ve literally just told us you’re standing up? Maybe someone will argue that this is some kind of poetic contradiction – to me, it seems like doggerel.

Meanwhile, “JUPiTER”, a slightly more pared-back narrative song about a queer girl facing homophobia, is almost repellent in its unfettered schmaltz. “It’s a battle for your song,” Martin sings. “You had to hide away for so long/ When they say ‘your self is wrong’/ The orchestra of rainbows play.”

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed above that the letter “i” is uniformly lower case in the otherwise mostly capped-up song titles. (Do you reckon there’s some tYpOgRaPhIc sYmBoLiSm there?) There’s also a track simply titled “🌈”. I can only assume these flourishes are part of Martin’s efforts to contrive an avant-garde mixed-media bonus track: the sound of a million listeners rolling their eyes at once.

It’s hard to criticise Moon Music without sounding like a miserable cynic, given the album’s bald-faced ethos of goodwill and positivity. But love is a complicated thing, and it requires more eloquence than Martin and co are able to provide.