A couple of 2 star reviews: The Independent and The Mirror

[Mimixxx]

Both these newspapers HATE Coldplay so it's not surprising. But still...

 

IN THEIR POMP

 

Mylo Xyloto ★★

 

Chris Martin recently suggested that this album, Coldplay’s fifth, was “dangerously” close to being a musical. But if it is, it’s a particularly weedy and prefabricated one.

 

For many, this summer’s televised Glastonbury gig confirmed Coldplay as their generation’s overlords of pompous pop and genteel rock. And Mylo Xyloto offers sickly simple melodies, greeting card homilies and big synth/guitar/string-driven rock-outs. Even guesting R&B queen Rihanna phones in her lines on Princess Of China.

 

After the skittish, skipping Hurts Like Heaven, Paradise quickly wades through the leaden gloom to scale the citadels. It’s as if lights stream through stained glass windows and the crescendo – a by-numbers guitar break – is stilled when Chris coos like the dove of peace at the neatly tailored close.

 

It’s all perfect for MC Martin and his accomplices to adopt postures, from Sting-like sincerity to Bonoesque intimations of profundity and revelation.

 

Coldplay’s idea of profundity is to pile cliché on cliché, love gets smashed into smithereens and roses grow through the concrete. Daniel is in the lion’s den.

 

The acoustic fireside sermon of Us Against The World is so full of Biblical imagery you wonder if Chris has a special arrangement with Bono. And their idea of getting heavy (Major Minus) is to match the vocal harmonies of Sympathy For The Devil to a Bullet The Blue Sky guitar breakdown.

 

Coldplay are a gentrified facsimile of what rock used to be, but which can still be experienced in a musical. Take the current West End production of Backbeat, the early Beatles story. The tunes are more than 50 years old, the musicians could barely play before the production began, yet they go places Chris and his perfectly polished pals don’t even have a passport to visit.

 

File under rock with a marshmallow filling.

 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/columnists/gavin-martin/2011/10/21/in-their-pomp-115875-23500599/#ixzz1bMsRExHh

 

Album: Coldplay, Mylo Xyloto (Parlophone)

(Rated 2/ 5 )

 

Reviewed by Andy Gill

 

Generally speaking, the more producers involved with an album, the less distinctively defined its contours, the various opinions tending to nullify the more extreme ideas.

 

For Mylo Xyloto, Coldplay have again employed three producers – Markus Dravs, Daniel Green and Rik Simpson – with Eno's role reduced to additional "Enoxification", and the results are smoothly pallid even by their standards, the usual modes of exultant melancholy and epic sympathy exacerbated by the earnest thrumming of acoustic guitars that punctuates the familiar piano vamps. "Hurts Like Heaven" opens proceedings at a peak, the twinkly demeanour of its bustling pop layered with disparate guitar lines; but it's downhill from there, the supposed concept – lovers united against an oppressive dystopia – rendered in music that's equally as hackneyed.

 

DOWNLOAD THIS: Hurts Like Heaven; Charlie Brown

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/album-coldplay-mylo-xyloto-parlophone-2373502.html

[Kiame]

These both sound rather close minded to me. It's written like they have already made their mind up about Coldplay and were going to slag this album off no matter what was produced.

[Guest howyousawtheworld]

Erm Andy Gill reviewed this I see. Let's remember what he said 3 years back trying to do a Jon Pareles but failing miserably. Somehow I doubt a man who wrote an article entitled 'Why I hate Coldplay' is going to give this album a glowing review! :laugh3:

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/andy-gill-why-i-hate-coldplay-844190.html

 

 

Never thought I'd hear Major Minus compared to Bullet The Blue Sky!

[juanif94]

These both sound rather close minded to me. It's written like they have already made their mind up about Coldplay and were going to slag this album off no matter what was produced.

 

This.