Coldplay, Moon Music, review: so sickly sweet it could soundtrack a children’s birthday party

Coldplay’s incessantly optimistic pop with lyrics that sound like Instagram self-help slogans has pulverised any hint of rock inclinations

3/5
Chris Martin has a plan. Moon Music is the 10th of an envisioned 12 albums from Coldplay (one of which will be an animated musical), which he suggested in a recent interview will make sense of their artistic journey from fragile indie hopefuls to the most popular British band of the 21st Century that has sold out stadiums across the world.
It would have been hard to imagine any of this when I first saw Coldplay in a small venue in the midlands back in 2000. There was something about Martin bounding around singing “We live in a beautiful world” that grated with my rock critic sensibilities. They struck me as annoyingly lightweight and twee.
But I became a big Coldplay champion across their 24 years at the top, won over by their fantastic songcraft, gorgeous melodiousness, adventurous showmanship and Martin’s humanistic charisma. I find them joyous in live performance, up there with the greatest stadium acts in rock history. But this 10th album reminded me of my original queasiness. It is Beautiful World loaded up on a rocket and blasted into space, a moonshot of shimmering keyboards, whooshing synths, twinkling guitars, luxurious strings, sky-high melodies and gushy sentiments about how love is all that matters, la-la-la.
So many la-la-las. As primary composer, Martin has never been the most poetically complex of lyricists, and often reverts to just making a sound to sing along to. Five out of 10 songs feature long passages of la-la-las. There’s a whole children’s choir at it on disco groover Good Feelings, with Nile Rodgers adding his own trademark effervescence on guitar.
But that’s OK. Sometimes a well-placed “la la la” is what a song needs, raising up the epic conclusion of tender Beatley piano ballad All My Love, and adding singalong punch to generic but effective peace anthem We Pray. On cheery acoustic LGBTQ+ anthem Jupiter (with a typically sloganeering chorus about loving who you want to love), Martin reaches a peak of ecstasy singing “Now all I want to say is / La la la la la lay ay” before an African choir fires up singing “I truly love you” in isiZulu.
Throw in an atmospheric chill-out interlude with the voice of late Civil Rights activist Maya Angelou talking about rainbows, and Moon Music may qualify as the most relentlessly upbeat album you will ever find outside of a children’s music section. An underlying theme of embracing hope in troubled times is spelled out on a briefly introspective opening title piano ballad, but otherwise it is unbridled joy all the way.
I suspect this is the kind of music people who don’t like Coldplay think they always make, but they have jettisoned a lot on the path to world domination. Swedish super producer Max Martin is back at the controls (as he was for K-pop collaborating predecessor Music of the Spheres), and any hint of Coldplay ever having had rock inclinations has been blasted away in a blaze of pop hooks. There is little of the fragile intimacy of 2000 debut Parachutes, none of the rock angst of 2002’s Rush of Blood to the Head or the epic grandeur of 2005’s X&Y. It is the upbeat, poppy Coldplay honed to a gleaming EDM point.
It makes me question Martin’s grand plan. Does the world really need two more albums of shiny, generic, blockbuster pop with lyrics that sound like Instagram self-help slogans, la-la-la?