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Rating: Success is a nasty beast, it’s something that gets inside you, takes control of you, makes you dependent, and you want more and more of it. It's the black hole many artists risk falling into when they reach the peak of success, and Coldplay seems to have completely plunged into it.
The previous work "Viva La Vida," the first album of the unfruitful collaboration with Brian Eno, had already made many early fans of the English group wrinkle their noses due to its pop turn, yet it managed to get a pass thanks to a handful of good tracks. This album not only confirms the radical change of style of the band but takes it to extremes, making it almost impossible to recognize in these 14 songs the same group from their beginnings, from "Parachutes" or the splendid "A Rush Of Blood To The Head."
If the initial "Hurts Like Heaven" is encouraging and gives hope for what's to come, this will instead remain the best moment of the album (along with "Major Minus") which from there on gets lost among the various "Paradise," "Charlie Brown," "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall," "Don't Let It Break Your Heart," in pompousness, synths and low-level electronics.
But since there's no end to the worse, this promptly manifests in "Princess Of China," the awaited (by whom?) duet with Rihanna, something unthinkable until a few years ago.
For the early fans of Coldplay, there's nothing left but to put on an old record of the group and hope that the intoxication ends and they return to what these guys once were, one of the best examples of English pop-rock of the last decade. But you know, success is a nasty beast.
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