Coldplay Wears (And Doesn't Wear) Fancy Clothes

Borrowing a phrase from Kurt Wolff’s excellent biography entry on Townes Van Zandt on the All Music website, I like to think about music in terms of the “fancy clothes” that it wears. Some music is stripped down to its very skeleton—no more than chord changes and lyrics—while other music is layered and complex…wearing, I think, “fancy clothes.” Music that wears fancy clothes is not bad; there have been significant contributions to musical history that rely on their fancy clothes. It's true that I prefer music without the fancy clothes; I tend to like music that has a solid, clear structure—such as Townes Van Zandt—but I certainly enjoy other musical approaches that rely on their fancy clothes to get by, such as My Bloody Valentine and Radiohead.

But not many bands find a balance between the two approaches quite like Coldplay does, especially on Mylo Xyloto, their most recent release. While even Chris Martin has termed it “a schizophrenic album,” I think that the album holds together by virtue of the band’s (and Brian Eno’s) seeming insistence on balancing well-written songs with those fancy clothes. The band has figured out how to write insightful, melodic pop songs and how to appropriately dress them in the studio.

Listening to Mylo Xyloto side by side with 2008’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, the key difference is how both albums deal with organic sounds. Viva La Vida finds Coldplay exploring a fascinating, but immaculate soundscape, in which every unpolished sound has been scrubbed away. The tracks on Viva La Vida sound consciously worked over and treated; Mylo Xyloto, on the other hand, displays a surprising number of honest moments—not quite so candid as studio chatter, of course—but there are guitar squeaks (“Us Against The World” / “U.F.O.”) and problematic low notes for Martin’s voice (“Us Against The World”), among other clear lacks of sonic pretension.

Speaking of pretension, that’s the other clear step up in the world that Martin et al have taken with Mylo Xyloto. All of the artiness that, at least to me, seems obvious in listening to Viva La Vida, has not so much disappeared with Mylo Xyloto as it has been fully integrated into the album's presentation.

One of those arty gimmicks that troubled Viva La Vida—the conflation of material, whether through pushing two songs together into one (“Death and All His Friends,” “Yes”) as well as those weird stretches of swirling, Eno-inspired synthesizers (again “Death and All His Friends” and the intros/outros to a number of Viva tracks)—is confronted and foiled in this album. Mylo Xyloto is a helluva lot more effective in dealing with that sort of conflation. Firstly, every song on the album is under the five-minute mark; three songs on Viva La Vida overshoot that mark. Secondly, those keyboard-washy interludes tied into so many Viva La Vida tunes are all actually separated into interludes here! And of those three "intro" sections, not one of them seems to me to be gratuitous. The builds that they lend to the songs they precede all feel consequential.

As cohesive and interesting as this album is, it also represents the closest that Coldplay has come to pop/dance music. Martin’s duet with Rihanna, “Princess of China,” is filled to the brim with dancefloor synths and a loud crunchy drum beats…oh, and Rihanna. (There’s certainly the thought that everything Rihanna touches turns to Top 40 gold.) But not only that song, but also the thumping “Hurts Like Heaven” and “Charlie Brown,” which features both those high, annoying childlike sounds perhaps best employed in Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead” and a gigantic guitar riff. 

If it wasn't already obvious, I’m  excited to see where the band will go next and what they're capable of with this new surety in sound...but I can probably live with this album for a while…