Is there any point criticising Coldplay? You might as well take issue with your own digestive system, or the word “the”, or the colour brown. They're there, they're part of the fabric of things, they're not going away. Indeed, so etched are they into our culture, with not just ambitious indie bands but every rapper from Jay Z on down adding a mopey none-less-funky chant-along chorus into their tracks in the hope of getting some of those Chris Martin dollars, that getting riled by their sound is, frankly, a short cut to insanity.
And anyway, they're not awful as such. For every mimsy-whimsy bedwetting “Yellow” or “The Scientist” in their catalogue there's a huge, soul-stirring “Clocks” or “Viva La Vida” which even the most curmudgeonly would have to admit is at the very least perfectly constructed to reach vast festival and stadium crowds. Chris Martin has stated that every track they write is created with the Glastonbury main stage in mind, and you can hear that fact shot through this album, which is even bigger, more anthemic, more injected with all the sonic fizz and pizzazz that Brian Eno brings to proceedings than anything they've done to date.
All the tics are there too – the build-up to Martin's leap into falsetto, the last word of verses held to a ridiculous degree so that crowds singing along will get all tingly from hyperventilation, the billion layers of chiming guitars that sound like U2 if they were made out of sugar and lace, the endless vague “feel your pain” platitudes wrapped up in mildly kooky artiness. There are some new twists like the zippy tempo and Oasis riffs of “Hurts Like Heaven”, or the ambient Sigur Rós chords of “Up With the Birds” but these are hardly radical. It's stadium rock for the “Keep Calm and Carry On” generation, as untroublingly pleasurable as spending your life thinking about elaborate cupcakes and unpretentious interior décor. And there's nothing wrong with that... is there?