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Agree with all you said. I'm glad you've found the will to go and see them again. Serious oldplayer commitment! I didn't even buy the album. And the way their live shows are the the moment I think if I attended it will only further reinforce my disconnection. Excellent point. I'm afraid it's all ba boom ba boom for the foreseeable future.

While very interesting, none of what you just said is going to happen. I've said since 2008 this band seriously needs to go on hiatus but they haven't and I doubt they will. The music will pretty much stay in the current form and we have to accept they'r now no different than Maroon 5 or Take That. Chris has emphasized a great deal how they're happy to be a pop band wanting to make happy music to make people happy that they're happy.

By far my favorite review so far. And very close to what I'll b posting in a few days. Watch out of for the barrage of hate though!

Hi Kendra, welcome to my favorite place on Coldplaying.

Many people are wrong. Many people consider Justin Dingleberry to be the best musician to have ever graced this planet, but he isn't. People might feel more attached to MX or GS or AHFOD because of their age and all other factors but these album shouldn't even be in the same sentence as AROBTTH. And this isn't my opinion. It's what almost all professional critics and the whole rock scene agree on. Also the decline didn't happen overnight and it's already been discussed here a million times. To see how and why it happened you can check the thread below. Oldplaying Thread

One of the biggest issues I have with the album and I'm going to talk about in my review is the absence of any real drums. I don't even understand where Will must have been during the recording process. Why would they make a conscious decision to produce the entire fucking album with no drums?!

3/5 After expressing a state of emotional paralysis following his “conscious uncoupling” from Gwyneth Paltrow on 2014’s meditative Ghost Stories, Coldplay’s seventh album finds frontman Chris Martin moving on.In fact, it’s all momentum, if rather short on melody. Head Full of Dreams is driven by propulsive beats and cheerleading handclaps with the band keen to reassure the people of the world that there are “miracles at work” and that we can party on. Big, inspirational American guest stars, including Beyoncé and Barack Obama, offer their support with confident and professional detachment while Martin keeps popping up with embarrassed but optimistic little “wooo-hooos”, like a British ghost in the audience of his own motivational party. You can hear some of this on the new single, Adventure of a Lifetime, which references Daft Punk’s Get Lucky in the bass line. In fact, although Obama says he does listen to Coldplay, he didn’t take time out of running a superpower to record anything special for this record. The band were just given permission to include a scratchy sample of the 44th President of the United States singing Amazing Grace at the funeral of the Rev Clementa C Pinckney, who was killed during a shooting at a South Alabama church in June. The real star of the short track, Kaleidoscope, featuring the Obama sample, is the 78-year-old American poet Coleman Barks, who reads his own translation of a poem by the 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi, including the lines: “This being human is a guest house/ Every morning a new arrival./ A joy, a depression, a meanness,/ some momentary awareness comes/ as an unexpected visitor.” Set afloat on a gentle pool of piano and glockenspiel, the combination of Barks’s rich, sonorous certainty and Rumi’s ancient wisdom makes a beautiful still point at the centre of a relentlessly forward-marching record. Beyoncé makes more of her appearance on Hymn for the Weekend, bringing her chunky harmonies and no-nonsense brass section to a peppy little excursion into indie r&b which opens with a paradisiacal fanfare and finds Martin dropping out of his falsetto autopilot into a more raw voice. He recalls a time when he was “low and hurt” before floating up back into the rafters to sing about feeling “drunk and high”. Paltrow appears to have moved on, too. At least enough to contribute backing vocals to the graceful piano ballad Everglow, about the love and admiration that can survive a break-up. Throughout, the band’s big, bittersweet sound is, as ever, wonderfully immersive: whalesong cycles of electric guitar echoing through a buoyant soup of synths that sound both pleasant and forgettable. The Telegraph

Guys lets not act prematurely. Just because a professional critic is unkind to what he/she believes to be a mediocre album you shouldn't feel threatened or aggravated. So far nearly all reviews and scores have been accurate in describing what really is a mediocre and at times terrible album.

A failure to commit to pop 3/5 Few albums in recent memory have suffered from more dispiriting advance publicity than Coldplay’s A Head Full of Dreams. It came not from the sources that dispiriting advance publicity about albums usually does – not from snarky music journalists, or a candid interview revealing that its recording was unbridled misery and the end product a disappointment – but from the celebrity gossip press, in which Chris Martin has been unlucky enough to find himself a permanent fixture since his marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow. It was April when Heat magazine offered some white-hot intelligence on Martin’s creative stimulus for the follow-up to Ghost Stories, courtesy of one of those “unnamed insiders” they’re always quoting. “He tells friends there’s no better way to find song inspiration than experiencing sexual chemistry with another human. He’s pretty much written an entire album of his love escapades since he officially became single.” That idea seems so ghastly that it’s hard not to wonder whether the whole thing was not some kind of demented fabrication, but counter-intelligence deliberately planted by Coldplay themselves, on the grounds that whatever they were in the process of coming up with couldn’t possibly be as awful as that. And so it proves with A Head Full of Dreams, on which the production seat once occupied by Brian Eno and electronic auteur Jon Hopkins is given over to Stargate: any Coldplayfans of the Real-Music-Played-By-Real-Musicians bent, horrified to find the quartet working with the Norwegian team responsible for, among other things, Rihanna’s Umbrella, Katy Perry’s Firework and Ylvis’ novelty hit What Does The Fox Say, might console themselves with the fact that at least they’re not listening to an entire album of Chris Martin’s “love escapades”. But actually, you are sporadically assailed by the terrible fear that some of the lyrics might be about that very topic – that the Adventure of a Lifetime alluded to in one title might involve the newly single frontman swashbuckling his way through a variety of conquests, among them the lady he approvingly, if oddly, compares to both the Pyramids and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in Army of One. But frankly, it’s almost impossible to tell: for once, Martin’s inability to write in anything other than cliches and generalisations feels like a small mercy rather than a black mark. There’s something appealing about Coldplay throwing in their lot with unashamed makers of manufactured pop. It seems to involve a tacit acknowledgement that the band’s real strength lies not in the handing out of windy platitudes, but the writing of hook-laden melodies; a recognition that the best thing about, say, 2011’s Mylo Xyloto wasn’t its terrible futuristic dystopia concept, but the tune of . Certainly, A Head Full of Dreams is at its best when Coldplay stick to the brief suggested by Stargate’s presence. The title track adds some pep to the tried-and-tested Coldplay formula – echoing guitars, bombastic piano, massed, stadium-rousing woah-oh vocals – by tying it to a disco pulse, while Hymn for the Weekend bowls along on an R&Bish beat. It’s one of several tracks that features a hook made from a vocal cut up into an unintelligible loop, an idea derived from and currently voguish with pop producers, although this being an album made in the rarefied environs of the musical aristocracy, the unintelligible voice has been provided by Beyoncé. Not all the album’s pop dabblings work – the hidden track X Marks the Spot features another R&B-inspired beat, and a lyric about putting your hands up in the sky delivered in a curious mid-Atlantic drawl that you fear may be the sound of Chris Martin “being funky” – but there’s a quite charming crispness and lightness of touch about something like Birds, with its snappy early-80s drum machine pattern and brusque ending, or indeed Fun. The latter song seems to be a more measured response to the Paltrow-Martin separation than the gloom of Ghost Stories, rosily recalling the good times before the Conscious Uncoupling – you can almost picture the cosy evenings in, curled up with a romantic glass or two of dandelion leaf and lacinato kale juice – and ending with a teasing line clearly aimed at the kind of magazines big on quotes from unnamed insiders: “But then, maybe we could again.” This stuff is a lot more appealing than the moments when Coldplay revert to type. Our old pal the windy platitude blows in once more on Kaleidoscope, a musical interlude featuring not merely a sample of Barack Obama singing Amazing Grace, but a booming voice reading out Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī’s The Guest House, a poem popular with the manufacturers of motivational posters featuring soft-focus photos of sunrises and mountains in mist. Everglow, meanwhile, is the kind of nondescript piano ballad that amounts to Coldplay sounding the way that people who hate Coldplay think Coldplay sound. To which Coldplay might reasonably respond: yeah, smartarse, and it’s also the kind of nondescript piano ballad that has shifted us 80m albums. Like their Eno-abetted attempt at experimentation on 2008’sViva La Vida, A Head Full of Dreams is frustratingly blighted by the sense that Coldplay haven’t fully committed to the album’s big idea: they keep deviating from the Stargate pop plan to knock out stuff like Amazing Day, which has a guitar line brazenly pinched from John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme and is self-evidently going to turn up soundtracking clip montages on sports programmes and reality shows for the rest of eternity. It’s a moot point whether that’s a sign of innate conservatism or of a band that know exactly what they are doing, who understand that you won’t keep packing out those Midwestern sports stadiums if you frighten the horses. As it is, there doesn’t seem much chance of Coldplay performing to empty seats in the immediate future. The Guardian

ROCKOL RATING: 3.0 / 5 Without a doubt, “A head full of dreams” is walking a completely different path compared to previous Coldplay's album "Ghost stories". The band is basically the same and it still has its own imprint, but if the previous release was an exercise in minimalism and darkness, this one is a noisy, witty, paty-loving affair. Basically, “A head full of dreams” is Coldplay's poppiest record ever - even more than “Mylo Xyloto”, which in comparison sounds like a rock album (even if it wasn't one!). “A head full of dreams” is pop from already the sleeve - a kaleidoscope full of colours. And the concept behind it is pop too: if “Ghost stories” was Chris Martin's sombre “break-up album” (about the end of his relationship with Gwineth Paltrow), this new release is about going back to life, starting to love and to enjoy peace again. The chronicle of a rebirth. Actually there are only four tracks that can be defined pure pop: the title track, “Hymn for the weekend”, “Adventure of a lifetime” and the closing number “Up&Up”. But, together, they shape the mood of the whole album. Does this work? Well, actually, it's up to you and your taste, really. Coldplay are still great songwriters and musicians, for sure. Even if the album, after a couple of listens, still tastes weird... the main thought is that “A head full of dreams” sounds a bit unfocused and a bit sparse. rockol

How the world's biggest rock band became culture's biggest mirror Even for the biggest rock band in the world, sampling the sitting President of the United States is a shift toward the mainstream. In the run-up to Coldplay’s seventh (and possibly final) LP, A Head Full of Dreams, news broke that the band would use a clip of Obama singing “Amazing Grace” on one of the record’s songs. The sample unites the most recognizable person on the planet with one of our culture’s most recognizable melodies, a moment shot through a pop culture supercollider by the world’s most widely known rock band. What we have here can only be called a singularity of ubiquity. The lead singer of Art Brut, Eddie Argos, , “I’m gonna write a song as universal as ‘Happy Birthday’.” All art speaks to someone, but only some art strives to speak to all. Chris Martin and Coldplay have been trying to write a song as universal as “Happy Birthday” for most of their career. More than writing music, they are trying to write us. Mass culture, whatever our comfort and discomfort with it, represents a relatively new phenomenon of the last 75 years. Even to be able to type the words “biggest rock band in the world” reflects a common understanding of industrial, technology, and economic development stitching us together with invisible tendrils. The same apparatus allowing you to read these words, a product of extractive resource management and 20th century capital and nation-state formation, has allowed Coldplay to exist in the collective consciousness as a cultural icon. Whether you love or hate Coldplay, no one needs to explain their existence to you. Like wireless internet, mass culture surrounds us whether we see it or not. Hannah Arendt worried in her 1961 essay “The Crisis in Culture” that “market-driven media would lead to the displacement of culture by the dictates of entertainment.” More than any rock band since U2, Coldplay harness the overlap of mass culture and mass media. Like an overly focus-grouped movie, each Coldplay album since 2003’s A Rush of Blood to the Head has distilled prevailing media trends into a codified, entertaining, and sometimes cynical package of songs. The litany of Coldplay’s digestion and regurgitation of cultural trends is long: the post-Arcade Fire impulses of “Viva La Vida”; the wide-screen global pop of “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall”, “Paradise”, and the Rihanna-driven “Princess of China”; the electronic R&B of “Magic”; and the cut-rate EDM of “A Sky Full of Stars”. Each moment revealed Coldplay to be a few years behind the leading edge of new cultural developments. It is perhaps no surprise that Chris Martin is so often walking toward the viewer in the band’s videos. He is quite literally behind the receding camera, never reaching the viewer moving away from him at every moment. He is always slightly removed from us, always chasing us. And yet Arcade Fire never sent a song to no. 1; the “Viva La Vida” video has been viewed 220 million times. When Chris Martin and his band performed their latest single, “Adventure of a Lifetime”, at the American Music Awards, four dancers in gorilla suits arrived near the end. Maybe it was supposed to feel edgy and fun; instead, it felt like Wayne Coyne and Miley Cyrus reprocessed for PG audiences. The performance was only a few degrees from the Kia commercial with dancing hamsters. The song itself, while hard to pinpoint as outright plagiarism, reflects Coldplay’s desire to ride the last moments of a guitar sound that rocketed songs like “Uptown Funk” and “Moves Like Jagger” into the mainstream. Not unlike sampling the President, Coldplay now aren’t cribbing their moves from the edges; they’re repackaging aesthetics from dead center. The band has become broader in its appeal and scope, producing a reflexive backlash. Describing new song “Everglow”, on which his ex-wife and celebrity Gwyneth Paltrow sings, Martin gushed: “I was in the ocean one day with this surfer guy, who spoke just like you’d imagine a surfer guy to speak … He was like, ‘Yo, dude, I was doing this thing the other day man, it gave me this total everglow!’ I was like, ‘What an amazing word!’ Then the song came completely out.” It could mean – and is – anything to anyone. While some of the cynical marketing and generic songcraft explains Coldplay’s fantastic popularity, it only hints at their unique position of being loved and hated with passion. In 2005, reviewing the band’s tipping point X&Y for Pitchfork, Joe Tangari called the band “carefully measured” and “nervously self-conscious.” So too are Coldplay’s fans and detractors. Listening to Coldplay has always been a look in the mirror, hearing a familiar sound or seeing an aesthetic retreaded for mass consumption – producing, alternatively, allure and disgust. Loving and hating Coldplay come from the same moment of recognized reflection, of self-consciousness. We glance at a version of ourselves. Coldplay, because of their incredible visibility, hold the unique power to throw trends back at us. Look at yourself long enough in the mirror and you will feel equal parts beauty and disgust. Look longer and you become unrecognizable, just a bag of flesh holding your soul. Look long into Coldplay and you may see nothing but a version of yourself; look longer still, and you see nothing at all. Their popularity is undeniable, as is their ability to divorce signifiers from meaning. Perhaps they are so beloved because of their ability to render cultural trends meaningless. Our comfort and disgust with the band lies in their emptiness. They’re the final word in cultural discourse; once Coldplay does it, it isn’t a thing anymore. We are, likewise, constrained and freed by their meaninglessness. Did our cultural climate demand a band like Coldplay, or did the band merely fill a need we never knew we had? Did we make Coldplay, or did they make us? Are they us, or are we them? Coldplay represents a simulacrum, a copy of a copy. Only Chris Martin could put a painting from the 1830 French revolution on the cover of a pop record, firmly divorcing the radical Delacroix work “Liberty Leading the People” from any meaning. In the video for the title track, “Viva La Vida”, the band becomes artwork through the power of a camera filter meant to approximate the finish of a cracked oil painting – the simulacrum in action. The album’s title, maybe their most apt, reflects its own meaningless linguistic ouroboros:Viva La Vida. Live life. This blithe tautology could mean anything to anyone, and it does. At the conclusion of the videos for both “Fix You” and “A Sky Full of Stars”, the audio of the band’s performance becomes a chorus of voices from the recorded crowd. While this sing-along is a fairly common trick in pop and rock music – the pointing of the mic to your many vociferous fans – it is less often done in the confines of a music video. But the part where they become us and we become them is critical to grappling with Coldplay in 2015. In the video for “Adventure of a Lifetime”, the band is played by poorly animated apes. Martin’s digital primate walks towards the camera again, close but never quite reaching us. It is the space between viewer and band that Martin and his band try to collapse. That space is the “Happy Birthday” aspiration, the song and the band that everyone knows. Coldplay are as close as any band to closing it, and yet the space remains. Consequence Of Sound

We experienced the same messy over-production on MX but not to this extent. As you pointed out correctly when you listen to the whole album it does feel like a constant struggle. In some instances I ask myself how Guy and Will could just let it slip so easily. That is a superb album and a great comparison. Unfortunately most people's counter argument here is that Coldplay just want to make happy dumb music for the masses. But why has that become the case?!

This song is a masterpiece. It will definitely become a Coldplay classic, and one people will remember for years and years.

Beautiful song! I experienced the exact same feeling with Rainy Day. Everyone thought it was weird but it's just gorgeous, and so is Army of One.

A very significant point and I completely agree with you. And on your question, I think it's too early to tell. They might delve even deeper into their current sound or they might surprise us all and announce they're finally ready to go back to their roots. Time will tell. And I'd like to say, I'm the last person who should be liking this album, but I'm enjoying it. The key word here is enjoy. For some reason that I'm still trying to fathom I'm getting a feeling I haven't experienced since VLV. But there are aspects of it that are just dreadful so as of yet I have no idea what my overall judgement will be in a few weeks time.

I thoroughly respect your opinion but technically speaking, TECHNICALLY speaking you're wrong. I accept that in your opinion they might not sound good but if we were to judge both songs from a musical point of view i.e how they're executed, the production and instrumentation etc they're THE perfect rock songs. They're also two of Coldplay's best output in their entire discography. But I totally understand if you don't like them. Different tastes is what makes music so exciting. I can also assure you those who stopped actively posting after MX aren't crazy. A lot of people myself included needed some time to accept the band we loved no longer exists. Pretty fucking wild back then!

I'm all for opinions and all but that is absolutely insane!!

It's actually "army....of one..army....army....of one". But I admit it's not easy to notice.

It's so fascinating to witness the evolution of this forum! I never thought people will be defending the likes of Justin Dingleberry.

Just beautiful. Obviously I'm a little biased since our master's poem is used on it. Actually feels quite weird listening to what you've been reading since childhood read in English!

Shock horror! I'm really really liking Army Of One. I find a lot of positive aspects throughout the album and so far I'd definitely rate it better than MX. But it could have been much better because there is also some major flaws. On the first few listens I realized Chris's lyrics and Stargate are truly ruinous. There are a lot of other things wrong with it and I hope we all discuss it further but I kindly urge everyone to refrain from posting reviews for now. Please try to give it at least two weeks after the official release to post your final verdicts.

After a few listens I feel the album had the potential to be much much better. But the production is so monstrous it absolutely destroys everything. And fake drums; fake drums everywhere! A proper review in a couple of weeks.

I would also appreciate a PM.

This is by far the worst music video I've seen for a very long time. I'm not at all bothered though. They've been shit since VLV and Ghost Story was the only decent one in 8 years. I'm just curious as to why they bother making such fucking horrible videos. Waste of time and resources if you ask me.

Absolute rubbish. I've long accepted their drastic change in sound and even tried to pretend it's not a Coldplay song from my very first listen, and it's still horrible. A drab song further ruined by the production and fake drums. 3/10. Since people are calling it a "ballad" and just for the sake of comparison I'd recommend listening to Hello before and after this. That song has horrendously boring lyrics and yet still manages to be haunting, beautiful and gut-wrenching. All because of her techniques and the superb melody, instrumentation and production.