Chloris

I’m delighted the band have posted this video and am just mesmerised by this performance of Sparks. It’s so beautiful. Do you think the vocals have been enhanced much?

Beautiful concerts, even though you could hear Chris’s vocal strain on Sunset (does he have a cold?). It was stunningly located and filmed, too. But Old Friends — not live and lip synced? It’s like a kind of music video insert; I’m not sure why they did that.

Thanks for sharing. Do you think it’s possible to try with multiple devices, or not given exclusive access code?

The Sunset performance isn’t on YouTube to watch again yet (I had to miss most of it)?

It’s an astonishingly beautiful song, the piano too. I have cried with it a lot today (but then I did lose my Dad a couple of years ago). I think this is their best ballad for a long time. I’m also glad they’ve had the courage to come up with something as unabashedly moving as this again.

Sorry, scratch that — I got it wrong.

So, I think you can also just preorder an album download — ie. no delivery address. At least, that’s what I did (from within U.K....)

Nope, I just managed to find it & vote (for Sparks): https://www.youtube.com/user/ColdplayVEVO

Do you think there’s much chance the shows in Jordan will be on YouTube for a bit afterwards? I’m not going to make the 4am (GMT) one!

So I just watched a 3 min interview clip of Chris on YouTube in which it’s briefly mentioned that the band won’t be touring this album. I’d missed that fact. Sad! Are we thinking pretty much no concerts?

I was awake a while in the night, listened to it on headphones at 3.30am and noticed a lot of textures (eg of the strings) that I hadn’t before, and it was truly beautiful. I’m still not totally sure about the melody at times, but it may grow on me.

Ah! I thought I detected a continuity with Hypnotised!

I thought Chris’s voice was lovely in EL. Took me right back. Didn’t mind hearing a few vocal flaws in Orphans: as others have commented, I too welcome a bit of rawness and authenticity. Would love to hear more of what everyone thought of the song EL? I mostly enjoyed it. There were some dreamy aspects that made me think of Hypnotised. Thankfully as a piano ballad it is (IMO) better than Everglow, which I really disliked as too cheesy. Though it’s still slightly tending towards the cheesy direction, perhaps. Couldn’t help but smile at REM line ‘everybody hurts’, and what felt like a bit of a homage to Jeff Buckley with the ‘alleluia’s’ at the end.

I like Orphans in a number of ways, but I’m really unsure about the ‘fun’ musical quality of the line ‘bombs go boom ba boom boom’: it feels really trivialising (for a song about orphans of war), or just weird? Am I missing something?!

Today I have been listened a lot to Coldplay’s Up in Flames, which I’d previously not paid much attention to. Resonates with a huge amount of loss I recently went through. It’s a really beautiful song and I read that it was written quickly as an afterthought for Mylo Xyloto, which is remarkable. Otherwise, I’m quite enjoying Rae Morris’s Lower The Tone.