My 3 Sentence Review of Coldplay's Ghost Stories

Coldplay's new album Ghost Stories contains almost no compelling musical ideas (except for maybe 3 tracks: "Magic", "Midnight", and uh...if I'm being generous "A Sky Full of Stars), manages to make the breakdown of a relationship sound dull, and is the first Coldplay album I actually regret purchasing (and I have all their albums). Consisting of songs with mostly 2 or 4 chord chord progressions, uninteresting ambient sounds, and a slew of synths and drum machines,* they hardly sound like a cohesive band anymore but instead a synthetic studio production. The main question is this: why was something so sub-standard even released into the world at all? 

Why Coldplay Will Never Be A Great Band (hint: it's the lyrics)

Look into his eyes...look deep into his eyes...

This is part 2 of a 2 part series on the work of Coldplay. You can find part 1 here: Coldplay Produces Shallow Pop Music and I Don't Even Care [but maybe I'm starting to]

The Story

Have you ever felt like you had a connection with a celebrity? Like in some bizarre alternate universe you would be friends with them, like the same things they liked, hang out with them, and have your kids play at the park with their kids while you talked about the mundane burdens of adult life? Well I have. One of those connections was with Chris Martin of Coldplay.

Coldplay Produces Shallow Pop Music and I Don’t Even Care [But Maybe I'm Starting to]

This post, from a few years ago, is my argument for why you should listen to Coldplay, how despite any conflicts you feel, just go ahead and listen anyway and enjoy yourself. You can read the more negative (or shall I say critical) post: Why Coldplay Will Never Be a Great Band.

On October 24th, 2011 the British band Coldplay released their fifth studio album Mylo Xyloto (pronounced my-lo zy-letoe, for those used to normal English words). I am a longtime fan of this band (more on that in a moment) but after hearing a few of the songs from the forthcoming album, I am quickly becoming disinterested in them altogether. Their new music is...well...uninteresting. Or is it? In what follows I try to work all that out by meditating on Coldplay’s oeuvre in particular and the merits of pop music in general. We will take on this dismantling of Coldplay in two parts: Part 1 will be in more of a story form and Part 2 will focus on specific aspects of their music.

In the winter of early 2001 I had the great fortune of spending three months in England doing ministry work in schools and church youth groups in three English cities (thanks Dave Jane for the opportunity of a lifetime!). Every month we were stationed at a particular church and we would do a bunch of events focused on youth ministry—teaching religious education classes and putting on morning assemblies in the schools, leading worship, preaching, doing skits, and putting on weekly game nights for the church’s youth group. The first month I stayed in Coventry with the Gibbons family and their son Stephen had a pretty decent CD collection. There was a new British band in his collection that he was sure was going to be one of the few to actually find success in America, much like Oasis, Blur, and Radiohead had done a few years before. That band was Coldplay and the album he had me listen to was Parachutes.