Coldplay’s LP ‘Everyday Life’ is the band’s most varied album and possibly their best one yet: Review
The release of Coldplay's new album, 'Everyday Life', adopts a more mature tone and a larger world view. It was released November 22 after their release of the single of the same name released November 3.
With varying tracks like 'Daddy' and 'Everyday Life', it is easy to mistake the album as a materialized collage of world views intermingled between things personal -- whether it be the group's view or a mirror image of our own.
Coldplay has highlighted their passion and renown for tackling the difficult task of merging the commercial and non-commercial by giving us a multi-layered and varied display of songs in this album that will promote discussion, speaking to audiences from multiple social groups, religions, cultures.
Tracks like the 1-minute, 16-second 'WOTW/POTP' offer a palatable acoustic sound, a tidbit into the simple yet profound album. 'Daddy' features a very personal, open-ended "diary entry" emphasis on the subject of the father figure and although embarks on a sadder tone, it calls out as a peaceful plea. With echoing, sustained strings and instruments hitting on more playful higher notes, it mirages childhood expressions and emotion.
Although the album incorporates a number of "slower" songs that Coldplay initially benchmarked from their early days, their album 'Everyday Life' has its fair share of upbeat that play with a variation of styles, with songs like 'Guns', a galloping country effect on the issues of gun control laws, and the choir chorus 'Orphans'.
The album being a two-parter, cleverly named 'Sunset' and 'Sunrise', seems to establish the fact the album plays out like a collage from a book of stories between those two paradigms. The 'Orphans' video features short clips of jamming and/or singing in non-studio settings and public places.
The mixing of the song is certainly noticed, as it jumps aplenty between studio-recorded, recorded-in-public, raw acoustic, electronic, and what appears as simple brainstorming/jamming sessions, and echoes both the natural and commercially-recorded sounds with varying degrees of the reverb effect you would get in each setting.
Changing the "echo/reverb" sound multiple times in a song is certainly a difficult task to perform, and yet, Coldplay has proven, again, that one can merge the irregular into the norm, and this in case the "norm" being what is commercially viable.
The last track on 'Sunset' ends off on a positive note with 'Everyday Life'. The video opens and closes with the Xhosa expression "Ubuntu", meaning "I am because we are." Being of South-African origin where such expressions are commonly heard, 'Everyday Life' has certainly caught my eye, and yet the video encompasses a holistic and meaningful world view and sticks to the simple and the relatable, across the cultural and religious aspects of the world.
It pushes for the powerful message of unity in a colorful world, featuring settings from around the world, including South Africa. It is hard to find a single conclusive "moral of the story" as the album takes on certain degrees of political, social and personal issues, and perhaps the underlying single message behind the album are these issues, with their many masks and faces, in their entirety and the call for unity, amidst.