One day, we hope that Coldplay will release a track of quite staggering magnificence just so we can stop being called predictable for telling them off. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. There’s something about Chris Martin’s vocal in the first bit over the dodgy ravey piano (see below for more on that) that feels very familiar; someone in our office said "what are all those Scottish guitars?" and, perhaps most strangely for Coldplay the thing that even their detractors will give them credit for, that ability to write a gaseous everyman sentiment over a daytime radio melody, is submerged in the strangely lumpen production. There’s something about this track that sounds like a boy band whose star is on its wane, which is probably the weirdest thing about it. "I’d rather be a comma than a full stop," Martin sings. And that, essentially, is the problem with Coldplay. They’re a group so massive they have their own momentum now, operating in a bizarre celebrity stratosphere that, in a way, is even odder than the one Bono flies through now and then. Coldplay are a corporation, monolithic and unstoppable, and this is what it sounds like.
Oh, and that piano bit at the beginning? As our Twitter followers pointed out, check this:
