Ghost Stories - Coldplay

It's possible I'm just going against the crowd: I loved and defended Coldplay when they were just moderately popular and hated by critics, although started to really hate them the second they became really popular and the critics started to ignore them. I do swear this isn't on purpose and only follows the pattern that the broader something is the more popular it is, and conversely the broader something becomes the more the personality just starts to seep out of its sides. Coldplay peaked with A Rush of Blood to the Head, emotional large yes, but good fun too. By the time the band got around to Mylo Xyloto, their 2011 album, the music was so large the songs sounded like over-sentimental pop radio tuned slices of a poorly made film score.

I did recently find a Coldplay song I like, maybe their best, No More Keeping My Feet On The Ground, a B-side from early single Yellow. I could imagine listening to it on release - this young band could go either way: the vibrating guitars forming into a lonely, sonic exploration of a wide open space. It would be wrong to say that Coldplay never "managed" this type of restraint again when they never even attempted it. Yet the lyrics sort of prophesied the bad side of Coldplay, too: 'Sometimes I wake up/and I'm falling asleep'. Most would just call such a line a "contradiction" although I imagine Chris Martin would call it something like an "impossibility" which in this case is another way of saying something that sounds cool but has no real meaning.

It would be stupid to rate Ghost Stories on how similar it is to an early B-side I like, although less stupid to want Coldplay to stop the upward trajectory they've been on since their first album: a very unsuccessful testing out of the belief that bigger is undeniably better. Bigger or smaller isn't what's good or bad, what your making bigger or small is. Ghost Stories, a horrible album, as uninspired as Mylo Xyloto but without even that album's pop sense of enthusiasm, has flashes of a smaller, more restrained sound, but comes from a band so uninterested in doing anything different that they never become more than brief flashes.

I know many people linked Chris Martin's recent divorce, sorry "conscious uncoupling", to finally getting a more personal Coldplay album (afterall, divorce has worked wonders for music in the past) but that really isn't the case here. Listen to the lyrics of True Love, what will probably (hopefully) forever remain Coldplay's lowest point, to see the laziness on display: 'So tell me you love me/If you don't then lie/Oh lie to me'. Bouncing off lovers cliches like this just a reminder Martin doesn't really have anything real to say about love, or anything else.

I will at least thank the producers: following the forward trajectory of all of their previous albums and making this one even more vast and melodramatic than Xyloto would have been the album equivalent of the 2011 Oban fireworks display (look that reference up for some laughs if you don't know it already). The songs are quieter, not quite movie score stuff, but they lack any real personality; it's an album so slight that on your first listen you'll recognize every track, Ghost Stories matching every basic prediction your brain made for what a slushy, sorrowful pop album would be beat-for-beat.

The only song that has any real magic to it is Midnight. The mournful tapping of the drums in the back, Martin's vocals muffled and hard to understand and the track itself, for all its feeling of a vast wall of sound, sounding stoic and lonely. It points to the themes of male heterosexual loneliness, a theme that Coldplay - Martin in particular - has always felt on the edge of, but has never really tapped into. On No More Keeping My Feet On The Ground it sounded exciting, a band with something to tap into - on Midnight the sadness of the song fits it well though, a band who had potential but now can only show slight glimmers of talent, like this one good track on an album of nine. I would say Coldplay could change, but if a divorce and a shitty album haven't woken them up then I don't think anything will.