Coldplay – Moon Music Review

What a day for music. We are spoiled for choice on a day like today. Friday, glorious Friday. The end of the week for many but the start for those who work from home and listen to noise, straining through the tinnitus, to hear what has released. Between The Smile, Geordie Greep and Henry Parker, it is unsettling to think people out there woke up today with the sole intention of exploring Moon Music, the latest piece from Coldplay. Frontman Chris Martin once said Coldplay would put a halt to making new music and simply tour what they had. We can only hope this comes true, because Moon Music, like the preceding, disastrous Music of the Spheres, is a continuation of their empty pop noise. Filler for the mind, which, if overburdened with the premise of a thought, would shut down. 

Simply put, Moon Music is uninteresting. It is a who cares experience for those who need some new noise to keep their radio in the car tuned. At its best, vacuous. At its worst, annoyingly plain. Predictable efforts from a band who lost their spark but not their notoriety. Moon Music is filled with spaced-out sounds, noise usually reserved for videos played at The National Space Centre in Leicester. If you enjoyed that, then you will enjoy the titular opener too. This is not a matter of hating on Coldplay to be cool, it is just another instance of being disappointed in a band whose experience should offer more. What they offer is what they always offer, plain sailing and faux-intimate music for the dulled mind. feelslikeimfallinginlove sounds no better or worse when paired with the rest of the album, a vague message which, like many of the songs on Moon Music, keeps itself intentionally broad for the sake of appealing to the largest audience possible.  

Appeal is the name of the game for a band like Coldplay and while there may be slight risks taken on the likes of We Pray with Little Simz, Burna Boy, Elyanna and TINI all featuring, the result is a messy and unbalanced track which is as reliant on the sickly string concoctions as it is on the name value of its featured artists. JUPiTER lingers as an empty collection of instrumentals, no heart to be heard as Martin and the band tinker with the promise of feeling rather than the expression of it. Good Feelings has phone insurance advert written all over it, the shallow waters in which Coldplay swim are easy to place elsewhere in the charts of the last five years. Nothing they provide here is anything close to the boundary-pushing pop group they used to be.  

Tiring pop riffs filled with soppy nonsense without the heart necessary to carry them anywhere interesting. Coldplay is an intense spectacle of empty positivity, for people who will share a photo of a lit-up Wembley with a heart emoji as if iPhone flashlights are a beautiful experience. Moon Music has all the beauty of those moments – a communal grift where the band at the centre are now replaceable. Coldplay manages to avoid words like generic by being so far behind the pop times they can merely replicate what is now out of style. If this is the game they want to play then so be it, but this avenue of sound they are cobbling together is of no interest to those who heard this sort of noise five years ago. There is a considerably worrying lack of development to their sound, to their experiences and the thoughts which guide their creativity. Moon Music is no disaster, it just serves no purpose.