Ghost Stories - Coldplay - Album Review

It’s not easy to love Coldplay in 2014. Any chance you get to say how “Parachutes changed my life” or “Fix You makes me cry” will inevitably get shut down by a hater; and there’s no shortage of Coldplay haters. There are plenty of reasons to hate Coldplay: Chris Martin’s whiny, depressing voice, the mopey and boring songs, or even the fact they did a track with Rihanna. But this in itself shows how it is equally hard to hate Coldplay in 2014: they are virtually inescapable.

You will seldom meet a person your age who doesn’t have an opinion about Coldplay, no matter whether they listen to them or not. Coldplay are huge, and not in an Arctic Monkeys or The Strokes way; they’ve carried the weight of mainstream rock on their shoulders for more than a decade now, and with each step they’ve brought something revolutionary to the table. The shoulders, however, really seem to ache on their latest release, Ghost Stories.

If 2008’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends was Coldplay’s deafening roar, Ghost Stories is a dying whimper. It is not the work of the world’s biggest superband, nor is it a triumphant left turn; more than ever, Coldplay seem weak and trembling, and with their last breath, they exhale Ghost Stories: a 9-song collection of fragile electric drum taps and exhausted guitars.

How did this happen? How did we turn from “Para-para-paradise” to “Rolling with the punches/ All hope is gone” in three years? Follow the trail of destruction made by the media about Martin’s infamous ‘conscious uncoupling’ with actress Gwyneth Paltrow (maybe she finally has run off with Iron Man) and you seem to find your answer: Ghost Stories is Coldplay’s attempt at a breakup album.

The biggest surprise, however, is that it doesn’t…. totally… suck?! Sure, it’s weak, and half the songs are cheesy clichés to the point of comedy. But there is enough Coldplay magic to make this more than an obituary to the old Coldplay; nay, this is the rebirth of a new one. It’s just a pity that the birth is so laborious.

Of course, there are the compulsory pop songs that must be present on any ‘big’ artist’s album: the first official single ‘Magic’ is as harmless as a toothless kitten and ‘True Love’ contains less sustenance than a packet of white bread. Yes, they take up costly time on a short album, but without them, Coldplay run the risk of surrendering mainstream popularity. These tracks, along with the bending and billowing ‘Another’s Arms’, will go down as many Coldplay songs have: forgivable and forgettable.

If Ghost Stories was the first you heard of Coldplay (as unlikely as that may be), you’d be forgiven into thinking the ‘band’ consisted singularly of Chris Martin. Indeed, the biggest crime on Ghost Stories is the sidelining of the remaining three members, chiefly the bald backbone of the four, drummer Will Champion. Where there was once a thunderous beast smashing the hides at the rear of live Coldplay shows, there is now a humble human tinkering away, unimpressed, at an electronic drumset. This surely has to be Champion’s most underwhelming role since that time he wore a stupid hat in a Game Of Thrones episode while the Starks were slaughtered. #neverforget.

The reason Ghost Stories is potentially so aggravating is that there are, admittedly, some great songs that make it so hard to hate it. ‘Always In My Head’ showcases an ambitious shoegaze gleam that glides under lyrics that harken back to Coldplay’s greatest hits (‘I think of you/ I haven’t slept’ – compare that to ‘When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep/ Stuck in reverse’). ‘Oceans’ is undoubtedly a tip of the hat to their 2002 debut Parachutes and a welcome relaxation in the midst of an album that is constantly making ambitious jumps between genres.

‘Oceans’ is sandwiched by the two most un-Coldplay songs the band has ever created: ‘Midnight’ and ‘A Sky Full Of Stars’. They are the Batman and Joker of music: one quiet, sleek and mysterious, and the other eccentric and unexpected.

For all the ‘I-miss-you-Gweneth’ clichés and sob-stories on the album, ‘Midnight’ speaks the loudest, and funnily enough, it hardly speaks at all. ‘Midnight’ ebbs and flows like a dying ghost, the only true Ghost Story on the album, with an intricacy and delicacy that few people other than Bon Iver can master. It’s truly the most bizarre and unexpectedly fantastic musical experiment since Kanye West did the same thing on the opposite end of the spectrum last year.

As both a Coldplay fan and a Darwinist, I have to say that it’s not like I didn’t see ‘A Sky Full Of Stars’ coming. It’s a simple process of evolution: you can see it everywhere in music, and while it may not be as extreme as, say, Radiohead, it’s close to the final metamorphosis for Coldplay. ‘A Sky Full Of Stars’ is, to put it simply, a banger. It’s been coming – they’ve explored that massive sound on Viva and ‘Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall’, which is why there is no point hating ‘A Sky Full Of Stars’. It’s a stupid, pointless, song, yes, but is it trying to be anything else? EDM is not designed to touch your heart (it’s designed for you to get other parts of your body touched by weirdos you met in a club), it’s designed to dance to. And, at the end of the day, who can resist a bit of dancing?

Coldplay obviously know that they don’t need to be the biggest band in the world anymore. They’re smart enough to know that you can’t sprint an entire marathon, and that all good things must come to an end. But damn, they had a good life motto: Viva La Vida: Long Live Life. So, when glory days are over and you’re consciously uncoupled, all one can hope is that they can leave some decent Ghost Stories.

Review by Ruben Seaton, check out his awesome new site Twisted Critics

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