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Coldplay: Everyday Life

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Parlophone Records
Released: 2019.11.22
Time:
 53:35
Category: Pop/Rock
Producer(s): Rik Simpson, Dan Green, Bill Rahko, Angel Lopez, Federico Vindver, Max Martin, Davide Rossi, John Metcalfe
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.coldplay.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2020
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


Sunrise

[1] Sunrise (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin/D.Rossi) - 2:31
[2] Church (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin/A.Sabri/D.Rossi/M.Eriksen/T.Hermansen/J.Collier/N.Shaqur) - 3:50
[3] Trouble in Town (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin) - 4:38
[4] Broken (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin) - 2:30
[5] Daddy (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin) - 4:58
[6] WOTW / POTP  (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin) - 1:16
[7] Arabesque  (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin/D.Goddard/F.Kuti/P.Van Haver) - 5:40
[8] When I Need a Friend  (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin) - 2:35


Sunset

[9] Guns (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin) - 1:55
[10] Orphans  (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin/K.Sandberg) - 3:17
[11] Èkó (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin) - 2:37
[12] Cry Cry Cry (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin/J.Collier/B.Berns/J.Ragovoy) - 2:47
[13] Old Friends (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin) - 2:26
[14] بنی آدم (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin/A.Coltrane/H.Whyte/S.Shirazi) - 3:14
[15] Champion of the World (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin/A.Monaghan/S.Hutchison/S.Liddell) - 4:17
[16] Everyday Life (G.Berryman/J.Buckland/W.Champion/Ch.Martin/J.Metcalfe) - 4:18

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Guy Berryman – Bass Guitar on [7,10], Hand Clap on [7], Percussion on [10]
Will Champion – Drums, Percussion on [7,10], Keyboards & Backing Vocals on [10]
Jonny Buckland – Guitar
Chris Martin – Guitar, Keyboards, Lead Vocals, Hand Clap & Piano on [7]
 
Aluna – Choir Vocal on [10]
Garine Antreassian – Choir Vocal on [10]
Jocelyn 'Jozzy' Donald – Choir Vocal on [10]
Nadeen Fanous – Choir Vocal on [10]
Marwa Kreitem – Choir Vocal on [10]
Apple Martin – Choir Vocal on [10]
Moses Martin – Choir Vocal on [10]
Bashar Murad – Choir Vocal on [10]
Ben Oerlemans – Choir Vocal on [10]
Bill Rahko – Choir Vocal on [10]
Norah Shaqur – Choir Vocal on [10]
Stromae – Vocals on [7]
 
Omorinmade Anikulapo-Kuti – Alto Saxophone on [7]
Babatunde Ankra – Trombone on [7]
Drew Goddard – Guitar on [7]
Daniel Green – Keyboards on [7], Producer on [2-16], Programming on [7]
Samir Joubran – Guitar on [7]
Wissam Joubran – Guitar on [7]
Adnan Joubran – Guitar on [7]
Femi Kuti – Horn on [7]
Made Kuti – Orchestrionics on [7]
Ayoola Magbagbeola – Tenor Saxophone on [7]
Max Martin – Keyboards on [10], Programming on [10], Producer on [10,15]
Gbenga Ogundeji – Trumpet on [7]
Bill Rahko – Keyboards on [7], Producer on [2-16], Programming on [7]
Davide Rossi – Strings on [7], Additional Engineering on [7], Producer on [1]
Rik Simpson – Keyboards on [7,10], Producer on [2-16], Programming on [7]
 
Federico Vindver - Producer on [2,10,15,16], Additional Engineering on [10]
John Metcalfe - Producer on [8]
Emily Lazar – Mastering on [7,10]
Mark "Spike" Stent – Mixing on [7]
Erwan Abbas – Assistant Engineering on [10]
Chris Allgood – Assistant Mastering on [7,10]
Lionel Capouillez – Additional Engineering on [7]
Michael Freeman – Assistant Mixing on [7]
Matt Glasbey – Assistant Engineering on [10]
Pierre Houle – Additional Engineering on [10]
Adnan Joubran – Additional Engineering on [7]
Matt Latham – Assistant Engineering on [10]
Baptiste Leroy – Assistant Engineering on [10]
Bastien Lozier – Additional Engineering on [10]
Issam Murad – Assistant Engineering on [10]
Lance Robinson – Additional Engineering on [7]
Anthony De Souza – Assistant Engineering on [10]
Matt Wolach – Assistant Mixing on [7]

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2019 CD Atlantic/Parlophone 533783
2019 LP Parlophone 9029535548
2019 Digital Parlophone 0190295320164


 
Capping their record-breaking A Head Full of Dreams era in 2018, Coldplay cemented themselves as one of the biggest international acts of the decade. Traversing the globe and selling out stadiums, they absorbed plenty of sounds and stories from fans around the world, which helped inform their experimental Global Citizen EP. That spirit continued to course through the studio, yielding their ambitious 2019 double album, Everyday Life. As traveling troubadours hopping across continents and seas, Coldplay captured some of that sonically revolutionary spirit found on Viva La Vida while pushing the pop-sense positivity à la A Head Full of Dreams. However, Everyday Life exists in its own strange, unpolished world, which frontman Chris Martin described as "totally raw" and pure. Their least immediate or mainstream-friendly effort thus far, the unconventional set veers into multiple genres and various directions, which requires listeners to surrender to the experience. Breaking further away from their standard output, Everyday Life also takes a stance as their most political statement to date, decrying police brutality on the infuriating "Trouble in Town," addressing firearm control on the sardonic "Guns" (which also has the honor of being the first Coldplay studio track to feature swearing), and putting a relatable, human face on the global refugee crisis with the otherwise joyful "Orphans." While these moments are intense (for Coldplay), they don't completely overwhelm the album. Rather, in typical band fashion, rays of hope, perseverance, and life shine through the darkness. Interpolating Pakistani and Iranian poets, the voices of Femi Kuti, Tiwa Savage, and Alice Coltrane, and Nigerian church choirs, Everyday Life lifts spirits on a rhythmic, worldly scale, just as church bells and gospel singers elevate intimate moments like "BrokEn" and "When I Need a Friend." While every track offers its own special moments, absolute standouts include the devastating "Daddy," a stirring piano-based weeper that sounds like early Keane; the bright "Champion of the World," which interpolates Scott Hutchison's "Los Angeles, Be Kind"; and epic showstopper "Arabesque," a horn-drenched peak in their catalog that showcases Femi Kuti and his band and Belgian rapper Stromae. If this all sounds like a lot, it is, making this effort a scattered but fascinating anomaly in their discography that requires a few spins to truly take hold. Closing a decade defined by stadium-sized hits of optimism, Coldplay manages to grow even bigger with Everyday Life, absorbing flavors from across the globe with their most indulgent and, perhaps, poignant album yet.
 
Neil Z. Yeung - AllMusic.com
 
 
 
Coldplay has a reputation for a sort of vanilla earnestness that isn’t entirely undeserved: The albums that made the British quartet huge in the early part of its career—from 2000’s Parachutes through 2008’s Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends—were generally filled with easy-to-swallow, expertly crafted pop songs. The lighter sides of U2 and Radiohead had cleared the path, and Coldplay chose the smoothest road that had been paved in front of it. That’s not a knock: The path of least resistance served it well, and the world got some truly fantastic, frequently melancholy songs, from “Yellow” to “Clocks” to the gloopy but undeniable “Fix You.” And Coldplay sold kajillions of records—okay, somewhere around 50 million—in that first decade. It’s hard to argue with those kind of numbers; the people have spoken.
 
But in the second half of its career, Coldplay has actually deviated from its winning formula quite a bit, with mixed results. Songs that permeated the culture were fewer and further between, even as the Coldplay brand reached a peak. (Some of that could have been due to singer Chris Martin’s marriage to, and then “conscious uncoupling” from, Gwyneth Paltrow; their conjoined celebrity status was greater than the sum of its parts.) The band’s last two albums seemed to push against each other, one being weepy and introspective (2014’s Ghost Stories) and one an attempt to return to Technicolor (2015’s A Head Full Of Dreams). Martin and company played with electronic sounds, Middle Eastern vibes, and guest stars, sometimes acting like they were thirsty for another big hit, sometimes navel gazing.
 
So it was anyone’s guess where album no. 8 would go: The rumor mill characterized the new Everyday Life as “experimental,” which in this limited context is about as useful a descriptor as “snackalicious.” Here’s what it is, though: quietly ambitious, occasionally ham-handed, decidedly political, dopily mystical, surprisingly pointed, and mostly pretty good. And, maybe most importantly, it is unexpected, in good and bad ways. Maybe those paying super close attention to Coldplay would have anticipated a straight-up gospel song featuring little more than Chris Martin’s voice and a church choir (“Broken”) or an introductory classical piece (“Sunrise”) that’s more mood-setting instrumental—with no members of Coldplay on it, it seems—than pop song.
 
And that’s really the story of Everyday Life, which bounces wildly from idea to idea, rejecting the overt themes that Coldplay has embraced in the past. So one minute there’s the rafter-reaching “Church,” which rides a danceable, sing-along groove, and the next it’s “Trouble In Town,” in which Martin makes a slightly ham-handed attempt at addressing racial injustice. “Trouble in town / Because they hung my Brother Brown,” he sings, before the song is overtaken by what sounds like real audio from a scary traffic stop by a racist cop. Bully for Coldplay for using its platform to stand firm on the right side of history, but it doesn’t exactly succeed as pop music.
 
The weepy ballad “Daddy” tests the notion that you can be simultaneously moved by a piece of art and slightly embarrassed for the person who created it: It’s just piano and Martin’s voice, with plaintively direct lyrics like, “Daddy are you out there? / Daddy, why’d you run away?” “Wonder Of The World / Power Of The People” is similarly spare, with Martin and an acoustic seemingly recorded on location somewhere, with birds chirping in the background. And just when it seems everyone else in Coldplay has disappeared completely, along comes the fully loaded “Arabesque,” with its Middle Eastern chug and a big guest spot for Femi Kuti’s saxophone. It’s whiplash-inducing, but mostly in a good way.
 
“Guns” is a low point, a bitterly sarcastic number that reads like a Pearl Jam B-side and won’t change anyone’s mind about its subject, even as Martin drops F-bombs to make his point. The title track is a little less stringent (and therefore much more Coldplay-esque), a “hallelujah”-filled plea for commonality that sounds lovely but, again, probably won’t cause anybody’s Facebook uncle to reconsider what he chooses to share. But it’d be silly to fault Coldplay for stretching its own definition. Everyday Life is, like everyday life, kind of a mess—a jumble of ideas and aspirations and successes and failures. In that way, it might be the most human thing Coldplay has ever done.
 
Josh Modell 11/22/19
A.V. Club
 
 
 
Coldplay‘s debut Parachutes turns 20 in July, and the band’s eighth full-length, Everyday Life, does have a sense of reckoning about it. Billed as a double album (it’s 16 tracks long), it’s a sprawling, questioning project from a group clearly stunned and dismayed by the crueler ways of the world. But it’s not entirely lacking in hope, thanks to their willingness to stretch themselves in order to help mitigate humanity’s horrors and slights.
 
While Everyday Life is bursting with thoughts on modern life, it also has the big-tent pop moments that made Coldplay one of the 21st century’s most reliable arena acts. “Church” recalls the churning splendor of “Viva La Vida,” with Martin’s voice weaving in and out of Qawwali singer Amjad Sabri’s sampled keening at the end; “Champion of the World” sounds ready-made for particularly inspirational highlight reels, its refracted guitars gleaming like the moon that’s likely been conjured in listeners’ heads by Martin’s E.T. references.
 
Other songs use found sounds to make their lyrics’ points more explicit. “Trouble In Town” is moody and foreboding, its galloping drums underscoring Martin’s descriptions of societal strife; as it builds into a frenzy, audio from a 2013 clip of Philadelphia police harassing citizens comes in, adding dread to Martin’s murmured, “And I get no shelter/ And I get no peace/ And I just get more police.” “Arabesque,” meanwhile, is driven by high-gloss horns and a stridently strummed guitar at first. The frontman’s coolly delivered testimony about the history-altering power of music soon gives way to a blaring, stretched-out horn solo by Nigerian activist and musician Femi Kuti that’s intercut with his father, Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, asserting that “music is the weapon of the future.” The sonic maelstrom that immediately rises up would bear that out — although the gentle rain and somber choir that announce the beginning of “When I Need A Friend,” which follows, show how music can also provide comfort.
 
When Coldplay takes a breath — whether through stripped-down arrangements or worship-music infusions — the emotionalism expands, and the distance between rock star and record listener shrinks. “Daddy” and “Old Friends” use their sparseness to evoke longing, with the former’s abandoned-child lament anchoring its sugary melody to percussion that evokes a heartbeat and the latter using fingerpicked guitar to add humanism to its elegiac lyrics. “Guns,” which opens the album’s second half, finds Martin in punk-troubadour mode, gasping for air as he decries a dystopia where the answer to everything lies in acquiring more guns, even if it means melting down instruments and slashing forests to stumps.
 
The title track, which closes the album, mirrors one path out of existential crises, kicking off with the very au courant question “What are we going to do?” and closing with Martin singing “alleluia, alleluia” over increasingly frenetic strings. At the song’s close, the music suddenly drops out — although if you start the album over again, the opening drones of “Sunrise” resolve its final chord. It’s a shrewd reminder that the only way out of one’s turmoil is through — and an effective invitation to hit replay on this catchy, curveball-filled record.
 
Maura Johnston - November 22, 2019
Entertainement Weekly
 
 
 
The internal psychology of rock bands is a tricky thing for outsiders to fathom but, 21 years on from their debut single, it’s pretty clear Coldplay are driven by two often conflicting impulses. The first is to be the biggest band in the world, a desire that was evident from the start in their amenable, uncontroversial songs dealing in generalities and emotions expressed so vaguely that anyone could relate to them. This instinct made them impressively adaptable, and when guitar rock’s currency crashed, they slipped easily into co-writes with Avicii and pop super-producers Stargate, and arranged guest appearances from Rihanna and the Chainsmokers.
 
The other is an impulse to experiment. One suspects it’s not something to which Coldplay are naturally suited – invited to compile a streaming service playlist of influences, they opted for pub jukebox crowd-pleasers by Bob Marley, Oasis and REM – but they keep giving it a go, tapping up electronic auteurs Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins for ideas, and releasing concept albums and pseudonymous dabblings in African music.
 
Balancing continued vast commercial success with something more exploratory is tough to do. U2 pulled it off on Achtung Baby and Zooropa, but have spent the ensuing 25 years trying to remember how. On Everyday Life, Coldplay use the breadth of a double album to try again.
 
The straightforwardly Coldplay-esque moments sound more straightforward and Coldplay-esque than ever. Only the hazy synth washes of Church tilt towards the more electronic direction of Mylo Xyloto and Ghost Stories. The rest could have come from 2005’s X&Y: U2-ish guitars chime plangently, pianos strike melancholy chords, choruses soar into lighters-out uplift. It’s all melodically watertight, but the things that traditionally annoy people about Coldplay are there too, not least the sense that there’s something too steely and deliberate about their desire to get stadium crowds swaying along. Orphans even nicks the “Woo-woo” refrain from Sympathy for the Devil, which, as craven bids for audience participation go, seems one stop short of halting the song and shouting: “Oggy oggy oggy.”
 
The lyrical vagueness seems less lovable than ever because the songs generally deal with sociopolitical matters. Until they tack a recording of an incident of racist police harassment on to Trouble in Town, its vague lyrics about the “system that keeps you down” could be interpreted as being about anything from the patriarchy to taxation to the liberal media. The title track, meanwhile, offers a bit of hand-wringing about the state of the world that concludes, as someone else once did, that there are a lot of very fine people on both sides.
 
Far better are a couple of acoustic tracks with genuine emotional heft. Daddy’s drawing of disrupted paternal relations is really affecting, perhaps because it homes in on the kind of telling detail – “Look, dad, we’ve got the same hair” – Chris Martin usually ignores in favour of the widescreen image. You could suggest Guns contains a hint of equivocation – “Everything’s gone so crazy … maybe I’m crazy too” – but by contrast with the rest of Coldplay’s oeuvre, it’s like something off Flux of Pink Indians’ The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks: a splenetic, foul-mouthed burst of rage and bewildered despair.
 
The rest of the album is given over to experiments, with varying degrees of success. Whatever you make of the lyrics of Èkó, which seem indebted to Paul Simon’s Under African Skies, its tumbling, Mali-influenced guitars are irresistible. The instrumentals Sunrise and Bani Adam are pleasant if inconsequential. Arabesque isn’t much of a song but the desert-bluesy groove is nice enough and the blasts of free-blowing sax carry a certain element of surprise.
 
But the dabblings in gospel (Broken) and bluesy doo-wop (Cry Cry Cry) seem like the result of a long and fruitful search to pinpoint the genres in which Coldplay are least suited to dabbling. The inclusion of WOTW/POTP is baffling. There are plenty of reasons to include a demo recording on an album: if it captures an unrepeatable moment of inspiration or a raw performance impossible to replicate in the studio. But WOTW/POTP does neither. It rambles aimlessly, it stops and starts, then finally collapses with Chris Martin muttering “I haven’t finished that one yet”, to which the obvious response is: “Why don’t you get back to us when you have, mate?”
 
Of course, it’s there as a signifier: that’s right, we’re Coldplay – one of the biggest bands in the world – and we’ve thrown caution to the wind. It’s a laudable intention, but Everyday Life is wildly uneven, held together only by its thematic obsession with religion: disc one (Sunrise) literally ends with a hymn, disc two (Sunset) with Chris Martin singing “Alleluia, alleluia”. You lose count of the references to God, church and prayer in between. What this signifies remains a mystery: has Chris Martin, a lapsed Christian, rediscovered his faith? Is it intended more in the vein of Nick Cave’s recent line about how “it doesn’t matter whether God exists or not – we must reach as if he does”? The answer remains elusive. As, alas, does the balance between world-beating commercialism and experimentation.
 
3 / 5 stars
 
Alexis Petridis - 21 Nov 2019
www.theguardian.com
 
 
 
At the midpoint of “Trouble in Town”, a sparse bit of kick-drum melancholy that recalls Peter Gabriel, Chris Martin’s distinct vocals take a backseat to audio of a Philadelphia police officer threatening a black man in his car.
 
“Don’t come back with the ‘What is it?’ f***ing s**t!” the cop shouts, as he orders the man to produce his ID – embodying another violent altercation on the streets of the USA between law enforcement and people of colour.
 
Everyday Life, the band’s eighth record, has been billed as a departure; a rare venture into the lyrical realm of the political and the angry, its cover art alluding to time travel and its title written in both English and Arabic.
 
middle-of-the-road music that is still often warm and likeable, whatever their detractors may claim. And with lyrics like, “Everyone’s going f***ing crazy/ Maybe I’m crazy”, on the anti-firearm anthem “Guns”, it may not be the most outrageous request.
 
But it would be wrong to not at least celebrate an attempt to break with tradition. Everyday Life still sounds on-brand for the most part, with maudlin tracks like “Daddy” and “Old Friends” not radically different to past work. The same goes for the soaring chorus and hints at magical realism in “Champion of the World”, a giddy ode to joy, featuring references to ET.
 
There’s enough grit and genre blurring here, however, to justify boasts of experimentation. “Orphans”, a sonically upbeat Max Martin production, is fuelled by desperately sad lyrics about the Syrian civil war, while “Church”, underpinned by a wavy, airy Kurt Vile soundscape, ponders feelings of disenchantment and hopelessness.
 
Elsewhere, the band step aside for moody interludes dominated by Iranian vocalists and samples of Afrobeat musician Femi Kuti. It similarly flirts with jazz, gospel and bluegrass, albeit often in too-brief snippets that feel more like rough sketches than complete songs.
 
Ultimately, though, Everyday Life is a fascinating, occasionally brilliant curio, reflective of a band still very much figuring out how to respond to a world that has become meaner, dirtier and crueller since they were singing about clocks and colours. They’re not quite there, but you can admire the effort all the same.
 
Adam White - 21 November 2019
www.independent.co.uk
 
 
 
“Every day is great and every day is terrible,” said Chris Martin in a recent interview. “There’s a lot of trouble, but there’s also so much positivity”. The statement was a departure from the Coldplay frontman’s recently optimistic view of the world; the kind of ‘posi-vibes’ electronic pop that characterised much of his band’s last album, 2015’s ‘A Head Full Of Dreams’. In 2019, Martin has acknowledged that the world isn’t always, ahem, “yellow”. It can, in fact, be quite shit.
 
Step forward Coldplay’s eighth record: a double-album comprised of ‘Sunrise’ (part one) and ‘Sunset’ (part two), which veers frequently between the topical and timeless highs and lows of love, war, racism, faith, gun control, friendship, climate change and police brutality. It’s an unflinching contemplation on the state of the world, armed with some of the band’s most experimental and uncharacteristic music since 2008’s ‘Viva La Vida’.
 
Opener ‘Sunrise’ sets the tone beautifully with a major/minor string arrangement that could be from a war film soundtrack – not the work of one of the planet’s biggest bands. The lead violin plays an at once mournful and hopeful timbre: a perfect representation of Martin’s note on the duality of good and bad.
 
What follows is the album’s best track. ‘Church’ is Coldplay 101: a moving, ambient, transcendental piece of pop music. As Martin digs into his usual adventurist metaphors (“When you’re setting your sail / Oh can I be your seventh sea”) his crystalline falsetto is met with swells of strings, cascading guitar arpeggios and avian trip-hop breakbeats. Norah Shaqur, meanwhile, makes for a stunning guest spot singing in Arabic verse. “I worship in your church, baby, always,” may signal the particular spiritual sanctuary afforded to Martin by his lover, but the meeting of Eastern and Western sounds alludes to a globalised acceptance of different religions.
 
That broad church perspective becomes a common thread of ‘Everyday Life’. The religious opinions of his bandmates Jonny Buckland (guitar), Guy Berryman (bass) and Will Champion (drums) remain unknown, but it’s worth noting that Martin has spoken openly about omnism (treating all religions as equal). And he doesn’t hide from it in ‘Everyday Life’. On the hushed, acoustic folk song ‘WOTW/POTP’ he sings of “a world gone wrong”, where he “shall be strong / […] My faith is strong”.
 
Elsewhere, on ‘BrokEn’, the band enlists a gospel choir for a stripped-back, finger-clicking piano number (“Oh the Lord will shine a light on me”). ‘When I Need A Friend’ plays out like a modern hymn, with the London Voices Choir accompanying Martin’s sombre chants of “Holy, Holy / Dark defend / Shield and should me”.
 
Later, on Sunset’s ‘Cry Cry Cry’ Martin references Jizo Bodhisattva, an enlightened being revered primarily in east Asian Buddhism. This loungey rhythm and blues number, which interpolates Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters’ 1963 hit ‘Cry Baby’, is one of the few religious-tinged tracks that has actually has something musically interesting about it. At first, Martin’s pitch-shifted chipmunk wails, partnered with his own raw vocals, appear gratuitous. Somehow, they morph into a catchy doo-wop accompaniment that becomes an endearing listen.
 
The strengths of ‘Everyday Life’ instead lie in the band’s musical left turns and lyrical experiments. Sunrise’s ‘Trouble In Town’ is a searing indictment of police brutality and systemic racism (“Trouble in town / Because they hung my brother brown / […] Blood on the beat”). A recording of misconduct by US law enforcement precedes a visceral crescendo of ‘A Rush of Blood To The Head’-era piano rock, with Buckland’s reverb guitar signatures clashing with keys and detuned synths.
 
‘Arabesque’ is another highlight. It’s one of Coldplay’s most atypical songs, with Nigerian brass arrangements blasting over a hulking, psychedelic prog-rock backbone. Three generations of the Kuti family appear on the record – so does Palestinian oud group Le Trio Joubran and Belgian superstar singer Stromae – which makes for a fittingly globetrotting record that espouses unity in the human race (“we share the same blood”).
 
The song’s accompanying A-side single – and the record’s centrepiece – ‘Orphans’, details hope amid the bleak narrative of the Syrian civil war. It’s the album’s obvious lead single, thrust with a slinky bassline, syncopated Afrobeat percussion and spirited choral sing-a-longs. We’ve had our fill of “woops” and “woo-hoos” across the band’s ‘A Head Full of Dreams’ though. You’re tempted to think: Please, no more.
 
Thankfully, penultimate track ‘Champion of the World’ (which uses the emotive guitar hook from ‘Los Angeles, Be Kind’, the work of the late Scott Huchison’s Owl John side project) rescues an otherwise trailing part two of ‘Everyday Life’. It’s a slow-burning ballad dedicated to believing in yourself, replete with the widescreen indie rock flair reminiscent of Doves’ ‘There Goes The Fear’. The closing title track, with its blooming strings and repeated chants of “Hallelujah”, sets you up for a ‘Fix You’-style cry fest but slightly short-circuits the whole thing. Still, it’s an interesting decision for a band that trades in build-and-release euphoric pop – and maybe that’s the point.
 
Ultimately, ‘Everyday Life’ is something of a confounding experiment. On the one hand it’s full of eclectic sounds and ideas – an Iranian poem interlude here (‘Bani Adam’), a country-blues musing on gun control there (‘Guns’) – that offer a welcome respite from Coldplay tropes. True, these songs are sometimes more exciting in theory than in practise (not something you’d have said of, for instance, the Brian Eno-assisted ‘Viva La Vida’), but ‘Everyday Life’ regularly steps to the left-field, proving that Coldplay are more adventurous than they’re often given credit for.
 
Charlotte Krol - 22 November 2019
nme.com
 
 
 
After their platinum 2015 pop-pivot A Head Full of Dreams, an all-star Super Bowl halftime show and a two-year big-box tour that shifted $523 million in tickets, easy-listening rock champs Coldplay release an album that aspires to more than stadium-packing. This is positive: when Ed Sheeran becomes your gold standard, it would seem time for a rethink. Signifying ambition as in days of yore, Everyday Life is a double studio LP; it’s Coldplay’s rangiest and deepest release by orders of magnitude, maybe even their best.
 
Divided into halves titled (wait for it) “Sunrise” and “Sunset,” the band taps into storefront gospel, Nigerian afrobeat, and Sufi qawwali music. There are choirs, orchestral strings and an Alice Coltrane sample; interpolations of the Janis Joplin signature “Cry Baby,” and late Scottish indie-rocker Scott Hutchison’s “Los Angeles, Be Kind.” Lyrics and soundbites address racism, police violence, gun proliferation, and Syria missile strikes. The band’s been judiciously political since Martin was scrawling “MAKE TRADE FAIR” on his hand. But the sentiments here have never been so specific. He even sings conjugations of the word “fuck.” Yes, he sounds very polite doing it, of course. But it’s a solid start.
 
The record’s multiculturalism certainly recalls Viva la Vida, the band’s vaguely non-committal 2008 meet-up with art-rock swami Brian Eno. Here, the music is both more eclectic and more unified. Instead of just attempting to absorb afrobeat, Coldplay enlists a cross-section of the Fela Kuti dynasty — son Femi, grandson Made, and a sample of Fela himself — on the swaggering “Arabesque,” while rapper-singer Stromae drops French verses for good measure. “Bani Adam” (titled in its Arabic rendering, “بنی آدم”) combines Romantic piano, Persian poetry (Saadi), and West African church music. Yoking it all together is longtime Coldplay production wingman Rik Simpson and hitmaking Norwegian chrome-platers Stargate, who helped sculpt A Head Full of Dreams. It’s a good team: what might come off as a virtue-signaling kludge instead, at its best, transforms the band’s faintly imperial universalism into a diverse, collective one. (It’s worth noting that the band will donate what one presumes will be significant royalties from a couple of songs to support both the Innocence Project and the African Children’s Feeding Scheme.)
 
As ever, they’re good students, sometimes to a fault. “WOTW/POTP,” with its echoes of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” suggests a lo-fi demo captured in a Trenchtown yard with birds twittering overhead (actually recorded, it seems, at Electric Ladyland in Manhattan). The bloody “Trouble in Town,” with an African choir invoking Nelson Mandela and a harrowing 2013 audio clip of Philadelphia police officer Philip Nace terrorizing a man during a traffic stop, recalls Peter Gabriel’s “Biko.” Yet these feel more like tributes than ripoffs. The masterstroke is the single “Orphans,” conjuring a generation of refugees in a barroom-singalong, with a bassline recalling Bakithi Kumalo’s pulse on Paul Simon’s Graceland, and a reprise so redolent of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” it’s almost a “have your lawyers call our lawyers” mash note. It’s a band whose great talent has always been its aspirational one-world melodies, now sounding much more like the world.
 
WILL HERMES - Rolling Stone
www.rollingstone.com
 

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