Coldplay
Everyday Life

As commercial and slick as you want them to be, Coldplay prove when you least expect it that they are capable of surprising, of having a more serious and dark side that doesn’t exactly align with mainstream rules. They surprised everyone with "Ghost Stories" and now they catch everyone off guard with this “Everyday Life.”

The album you don't expect at all, totally off the beaten path, not aiming primarily to top the charts (yet it does so anyway), and defies nearly all the rules of pop, rather it swims against the current. Starting with the choice to release an album composed of two parts, one called “Sunrise” and the other “Sunset”; in the era of streaming and YouTube with an audience that thinks in “songs” and typically isn’t interested in albums (even if pop has never truly been an album-oriented genre), a double album with an ambitious project appears a risky choice. The album has an experimental nature but even within the type of experimentation, it decidedly goes against the grain; when experimenting these days, one tends to choose the electronic route, often the more trendy and slick one, but here Coldplay manifest themselves in a mostly acoustic and delicate guise (and remember, delicate sounds are never truly in fashion) and choose to complicate their lives by venturing into genres that are rather far from the masses' tastes, sometimes even sounding strange to listeners’ ears; numerous forays into folk in its various forms, but also into world music, blues, gospel, soul, and classical; sounds that are anything but trendy and even stemming from decades long past; I hadn’t seen a shift towards such unfamiliar sounds since Pain of Salvation's “BE,” with the difference that you really don’t expect it from Coldplay. The length of the tracks also deserves attention, half of them last less than three minutes and express their fullest potential, it is remarkable how the band has managed to condense all their creativity into such short time frames, it's easier to do the opposite, it's more common to encounter attempts to compose longer tracks.

But let's take an overview of the tracks, let’s delve deeper into specifics. The most surprising moments that catch anyone off guard are undoubtedly the gospel tune “Broken,” the deliberately whiny rhythm’n’blues of “Cry, Cry, Cry,” but especially the quasi-Gregorian chant “When I Need a Friend,” these are the boldest and riskiest sounds, they would be for any contemporary group, even more so for a pop group, it’s like attempting to woo a selfie-loving, nightclub-going girl by taking her to a museum instead of settling for a simple pub, they are exactly the type of songs that if you hand an earbud to any kid, they would exclaim “what is this stuff?” But the rest is not to be outdone, the rest is also disorienting and not flattering for those who want to hook up, you certainly can’t seduce a girl with rather dark folk ballads; I’m referring, for example, to the neo-acoustic “WOTW / POTP,” which recalls the style of Kings of Convenience, the lively western-style guitar of “Guns,” up to the more rural indie folk of “Èkó” or the campfire circle song “Old Friends.” Gypsy rhythms characterize “Arabesque” (with brass inserts and Stromae on vocals), while “Orphans” embraces African choirs and atmospheres, yet placed in a more pop context, akin to a mix between U2 and Peter Gabriel. The intro “Sunrise” is marked by orchestral classical music, an influence that we see in a more pop rendition in the final “Everyday Life,” a classically inspired piano is found in “بنی آدم.” “Trouble in Town” and “Daddy” focus much on delicacy and little on blending, they sound lighter and calmer than ever before. The two most purely pop tracks are undoubtedly “Church” and “Champion of the World,” among the few with radio and stadium appeal.

So, we can say without hesitation: “Everyday Life” is not a trendy album, it’s an album that instead contradicts anyone who was convinced that Coldplay was a band caught up in the music business with a focus on profit over emotional expression. They are continually targeted by the snootiest critics for their tendency to chase easy success, but if we thoroughly analyze Coldplay's career, we ultimately conclude they have always been a band with a certain attention to things done well and to more or less refined melodies, the only two really slick and commercial albums with anthems for stadiums are just two, “Mylo Xyloto” and “A Head Full of Dreams,” and anyway, even they were pretty good pop records when compared with the filth commonly circulating in the 21st century. This latest piece probably won’t be enough to elevate them to “great band” status, they remain a “good” band, but in the meantime, they have won, the artistic vein has won over the profitable one and for a pop band involved in that huge whirlwind that sucks you in that is the music business, it’s remarkable, it hardly matters if they immediately announced the intention to return as soon as possible with a more easygoing counterpart (the same thing they did after “Ghost Stories”), if you have an artistic side, the easygoing one can be easily forgiven, indeed, even justified if not approved, an artist should rightly have a “light” side, also to demonstrate that in the end, he may be as snobbish and aloof as he wants, but in the end, he is human and a child of the contemporary world too, he is on the same boat and there’s no escape for anyone.

But Coldplay also wins on another aspect, the human and social one to which they have always shown themselves close, deciding not to follow the album release with a stadium tour (also foregoing hefty earnings, under this aspect too, the economic goal was set aside) until it becomes environmentally sustainable (nonetheless emphasizing that the album doesn’t have stadium-friendly sounds), while instead, Jovanotti does tours on beaches where we’ve always seen people merrily camping and leaving tons of waste behind.

Probably, they could afford to do all this, probably the wide success already achieved allowed them to fully be themselves, but in the meantime, at least for the moment, Coldplay have won.