Coldplay is a legendary moniker for what it means to make music that relaxes one’s shoulders. Throughout the band’s history, they have made a name for themselves as a group that makes people fondly look back on their own lives. Their breakout single “Clocks” ingrained a simple arpeggiated piano melody into the minds of almost everyone on the planet. Chris Martin softly sings about longing for home through convoluted and symbolic lyricism. “Viva La Vida” is another worldwide classic that sports a rather basic chord progression, accentuated by a hypnotic rhythmic structure and orchestral elements that accentuate the main melody for all of the song as Martin personifies the melancholic ruler of a now-fallen kingdom. I am quite fond of their 2000 album Parachutes, in my humble opinion, it is exemplary of Coldplay at their best. The well-known song titled “Yellow” off of that record is certainly my favorite song this band has created by a large margin and reminds me of black silhouettes of trees flitting by at dusk as I gaze out the window of the minivan my family owned during my childhood. Needless to say, Coldplay has a profoundly impressive discography, and it was quite disappointing to hear them say that Moon Music would be their tenth and final album and even more disappointing to see the lack of content we received with that record.
Moon Music is an album that is dominated by an absence of any innovative content, both lyrically and sonically. Most of the tracks on this record, including the teaser single released before the full album, sport bland, emotionless chord progressions, and sound design that would be boring if it had been released twenty years ago. People have compared this LP to the legendary psychedelic prog-rock project The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, and I have absolutely zero clue what they could possibly be hearing that I am not because almost the entirety of Moon Music is so devoid of creativity that it feels like it could be played as background music for the most lukewarm motivational talk that you’ve ever heard. The lyrics on this project are somehow exponentially worse than the sound design with lines that are so basic and bland that feels like they could be written by artificial intelligence. Even on the songs that are somewhat redeemable instrumentally, the lyrics still communicate absolutely nothing. It also felt like Chris Martin decided to start vocalizing with “oohs” and “aahs” whenever he ran out of ideas for lyrics for the choruses of these songs. Track two on this project, “feelslikeimfallinginlove” is a prime example of this phenomenon. Track three, “WE PRAY,” feels like Coldplay was trying to be Imagine Dragons for a song and, despite the iconic rapper Little Simz being among the people featured on the record, failed miserably.
Despite the overwhelmingly uninspired nature of this project, there are a handful of pleasant moments throughout its 44-minute runtime. The intro and outro tracks, “MOON MUSiC (Yes, it’s capitalized like that)” and “ONE WORLD” take influences from ambient music as well as orchestral film scores and set up soundscapes that swell and crescendo beautifully before moving into different arrangements. “AETERNIA” is a nice dance track with moments that feel transcendent, and “ALL MY LOVE” is a heartwarming piano-focused ballad that feels quite akin to many songs off of Parachutes. None of these even remotely compare to “Rainbow,” which is genuinely one of the best songs I have heard this year and made me tear up when listening to it for the first time. It begins with a wonderful tape-edited ambient composition that ramps up into an astonishing explosion of shoegaze sounds before fading into a piano riff that progresses into another equally impressive snowball effect of sounds that can only be explained by listening to it with one’s own ears before ending with a nice soundbite of a man joyously looking back on his life experience. This alone made the rest of the LP worth listening to, but the vast majority of these tracks could be skipped over without fear of missing something interesting.
