Coldplay — Mylo Xyloto

Parlophone | discogs.com

To hell with the haters, this is fun and good.

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Mylo Xyloto was ranked tenth in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2017, and was awarded the Rainbow Rhododendron for Most Garish Presentation

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One of my biggest pet peeves, alongside the misuse of the word ‘whom’ and referring to nonhumans as children, is the concept of the guilty pleasure. To avoid judgement, we couch enjoyment of the unfashionable in layers of irony, the unfashionable sometimes including chart-topping, Spotify-crashing, zeitgeist-defining music. And folks, this just ruffles my feathers.

It grinds my gears to hear that musical value is somehow lessened by popularity, or indeed increased by obscurity. It is a fly in my ointment to see the fresh, the new, the wonderful dismissed out of hand because by definition it can offer nothing of substance. It vexes the bugbear in my bugbear repository to read that the mindless masses of today, as distinct from the mindless masses of decades past, crave nothing but sugary confection and wouldn’t know good music if it smacked them in the jaw with the wall from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. These parameters are of course restricted to contemporary hits; zeitgeist-definers of yesteryear are untouchable masterpieces.

To all this, I say: fuck right off.

There is so much to like on iTunes and Bandcamp, in shining spotlights and tiny cafés, from hipster guitar balladry to Inuit throat singing, from ‘Sergeant Pepper’ to ‘Shape of You.’ This is not to imply that all criticism of modern pop is baseless, nor that anything recorded prior to the invention of the iPod is overhyped and overrated. I merely suggest that the alleged yardstick of objective quality (whose short end finds itself in the grasp of modern pop a statistically improbably fraction of the time) is a myth. The only standard by which you should judge music is how much you personally enjoy it, and energy wasted on tearing down the new and the harmless would be better expended being happy.

So enjoy things! Like things! Fly your freakish flag unashamedly and unironically. It’s that simple.

And now on to Coldplay.

They’re fine.

Once lauded as a successor to both U2 and Radiohead, Coldplay exist in a strange limbo between the monumentally popular and the perennially uncool — they consistently sell out massive arena tours, and yet I can count the number of fans I have met on my thumbs.

Coldplay have charted quite the trajectory, pinballing from their initial jangly alt-rock stylings through a period of tentative experimentalism, sliding up the rainbow of enoxification before dipping a toe into grimmer waters and finally splashing back to phosphorescence. But all the while, they remain a pop band wearing various configurations of hat: killer hooks, huge sing-along choruses, and they ace the hummability test.

Mylo Xyloto spurts colour from its every orifice, bigger and brighter than ever before. It is a mid-rainbow snapshot of a band ten years into their career trying something different because they’re bored and they can. Coldplay injected just enough freshness to keep things interesting, as evidenced in the brief instrumental interludes that set the scene for each act of the album, and the daringly serrated edges of standout track ‘Princess of China’ — you’d think a guest spot from the explicitly outspoken Rihanna would stick out like one of those sore thumbs alongside as clean-cut a figure as Coldplay’s Chris Martin, but the two make surprisingly congruent bedfellows. Mylo is not as compact as Prospekt’s March, their loveliest little companion EP, nor as charmingly scattershot as the latter’s host album Viva la Vida (or, Death and All His Friends), an opus as magnum as Coldplay is ever likely to make. Mylo is its own satisfying emotional arc; consistent but not stagnant, extroverted but not obnoxiously so, self-contained but never fettered. It strikes a balance between florid and fun.

(I would like now to share a fairly peripheral anecdote.

This album holds the dubious honour of being the last physical CD I ever purchased, way back in the distant primeval past of 2011. It was a balmy October afternoon. The sun was shining meekly through the fluffy clouds of spring, already slightly too warm for comfort, portending the ferocious Canberra summer that was yet to come. A gentle breeze caressed my freshly shaven chin, recently liberated of ten days of nasty adolescent peach fuzz. The day after returning from Year 10 camp, I wandered up to the city centre with a birthday voucher clutched in my sweaty fist, and wandered back with a freshly minted press of Mylo Xyloto and a copy of Pokémon Black. That was my last proper camp with tents and hiking and dirt and nature and such, before the transition to school retreats. I really enjoyed those. It’s always nice to socialise with students and staff alike in a different context, and shower regularly; well worth the price of admission, which was to get Catholicked at for a few days.

Anyway, I digress. On with the show.)

One of those comparisons I made a few paragraphs ago is worth examining in further detail.

Beyond the swooping falsetto register in which their respective frontmen regularly indulge, both Coldplay and Radiohead split the difference between profundity and platitude, coming down on opposite sides of the divide. There is a sliver of flint at the core of Radiohead’s prodigious discography. When Thom Yorke sings something as banal as the itinerary of his morning, it is weighed down with gelatinous melancholy: the mindless brushing of the teeth is a metaphor for the human condition, while black coffee and burnt toast serve only as reminders of identical breakfasts being consumed by identical crowds in identical homes across a world of grey discontent. Meanwhile, Chris Martin ejects himself from his bed, throws open the window to a bright sunny day, harmonises with the bluebirds on his sill and proceeds to join a jolly selection of neighbours in the street for a complicated song-and-dance routine. He is the goopy syrup inside those weird toothachey gummis. Through repetition and concentration, Radiohead grasp for the truth beneath the façade. Coldplay take these little nothings and inflate them to exuberant proportions. Even the title of the album is admittedly meaningless; just some cool words they made up to set the imagination spinning. And it does just that — you can be as deep and philosophical as you like, but being big can work just as well.

Furthermore, Radiohead are capable of (and indeed work best when) operating in shades of grey, while Coldplay see only black and white. It is their greatest strength that they refuse half-measures. Chris Martin throws himself so enthusiastically into the most ridiculous lyrics that even the curmudgeonliest of listeners must concede his unequivocal sincerity. He really believes that he’s changing the world with nuggets of wisdom like “every siren is a symphony / and every tear’s a waterfall,” and with those strobing synths and pounding drums to back them up, who’s to say he’s wrong?

Larry Fitzmaurice of Pitchfork said it best when he made the startlingly apt comparison between Coldplay and a koi pond: “deceptively shallow but, if caught at the right moment, shimmeringly beautiful.”

It’s okay that other people find pleasure in things that make your toes curl. It’s okay that some things are not for you.

Coldplay write fun, feel-good music. And that’s enough for me.