Ghost Stories: an Album Review
Coldplay is a lot like U2 in a couple ways. There’s the trajectory comparison of how they started out as a small-time alternative band that was playing stadiums not even 10 years later, and there’s the opinion that despite their reputation as the biggest band on Earth, most people wouldn’t dare admit to liking them for fear of immediately being ostracized and sent to a cave in Newark. But now, even their album history looks to fall into the same line. After very serious music that got them praise/ridicule (The Joshua Tree, Viva La Vida), they went into a more fun, bouncy, veering on irony style with Acthung Baby and Mylo Xyloto. And now, Coldplay has made what’s likely their most melancholy and emotional album ever. Effectively, Coldplay has made a whole album of “One.” And no, it’s not as good as that sounds.
If you’re the kind of person who pays attention to Chris Martin’s personal life, then you have likely heard about the separation between Martin and his wife, Gwyneth Paltrow. They’re apart, Chris Martin is sad, he made an album about how sad he is so that everyone can share with him the eternal sadness that he has. This is the story of Chris Marin, who cried a river and drowned the whole world. And this is obvious just from the cover, where the 80s dystopia theme of Mylo is replaced with a late-night aesthetic that looks like it’s sketched in a teenage girl’s school planner. It’s all very serious and heartfelt and all that, but the music doesn’t reflect it as well as it could.
I will be the first person to admit that I do enjoy Coldplay from time to time. Parachutes and A Rush of Blood to the Head are great, and so is Viva La Vida to a lesser extent. Mylo was a little too silly, and X & Y is just plain mediocre, but they aren’t a bad band. And this continues here, with Ghost Stories being one of their weaker albums, but still not bad. Coldplay might get boring sometimes, but they do have heavy quality control on all their releases, which is why you never hear about a Coldplay album being a massive failure. They’ll never release of failure on the level of Battle Born by the Killers.
Still, compared to previous releases, a lot of problems that creeped in with X & Y are repeated here, but in the opposite way. While X & Y suffered from general emotion being replaced with Coldplay needing to show they could repeat success again, Ghost Stories is overburdened by its emotion. It’s like watching a man cry in the fetal position while you’re waiting for the subway. You want to help him somehow, but he’s making a scene and you don’t want to get involved. But it’s still Coldplay, so it’s polished and waxed until that man is crying in the subway in a tuxedo with a bottle of champagne, so now it’s harder to take that outburst seriously when he’s crying right into his money.
Sad albums are just harder to take seriously when they are so polished. The emotion is wronged out by studio techniques and perfected takes. There’s also the electronic influence that pervades the album, even when the songs would have worked better with an acoustic setup. This is most notable in the Avicii-produced single “A Sky Full of Stars,” where any emotion in the lyrics is replaced with “Levels.” It’s not explicitly bad, but the perfection is diminishing the results of what could have been a whole album of “The Scientist.”
Coldplay is not a bad band. They just have a problem of their popularity getting in the way of what would be best in terms of songwriting. This album could have been an emotional punch to the gut, but it ends up just looking like a teenage poet’s idea of what unbearable sadness feels like. If you’re a Coldplay fan, you’ll enjoy it, but besides that, there’s no need to rush out.
Score: 6/10
Best Song: Magic
Worst Song: A Sky Full of Stars
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