Everyday Life certainly shatters the illusion that Coldplay is a boring, safe band – so if nothing else, that’s a start.
While Everyday Life is bursting with thoughts on modern life, it also has the big-tent pop moments that made Coldplay one of the 21st century’s most reliable arena acts.
These songs are sometimes more exciting in theory than in practise, but ‘Everyday Life’ regularly steps to the left-field, proving that Coldplay are more adventurous than they’re often given credit for.
Closing a decade defined by stadium-sized hits of optimism, Coldplay manages to grow even bigger with Everyday Life, absorbing flavors from across the globe with their most indulgent and, perhaps, poignant album yet.
They are here to make a statement while also releasing their familiar emotional ballads. Everyday Life mixes the magic of “old” Coldplay with their smash hits that have kept them at the top for so long. And it works.
Everyday Life lives between the stripped-down comfort of Ghost Stories and the mercurial nature of Viva La Vida, but most importantly, it provides more hope than ever that they have another masterpiece in them.
They sound refreshed, revitalised, and on their best form since Viva La Vida, even if the quality does vary throughout the record.
Everyday Life is, like everyday life, kind of a mess—a jumble of ideas and aspirations and successes and failures. In that way, it might be the most human thing Coldplay has ever done.
Balancing continued vast commercial success with something more exploratory is tough to do ... On Everyday Life, Coldplay use the breadth of a double album to try again.
Tackling gun control and police brutality, Coldplay’s eighth album is a valiant, if flawed, attempt to break from tradition.
Everyday Life may not be able to reach the peaks of Coldplay’s work in the 2000s or have the discipline of the mostly-minimalist Ghost Stories, but it shows a level of creativity, imagination and sheer enjoyment in making music that felt like it had been lost.
Everyday Life has more blunders than hits, but let's give Coldplay some credit — they've got a "go big or go home" attitude that's entertaining, even when it misses the mark.
Everyday Life is a well-produced but unfocused album with an incomplete message.
Over the course of the whole record, the uninspired songwriting becomes a bit tiring, so the album as a whole is a disappointment for a band with so much talent and past successes, especially as prior to its release Everyday Life was suggested to be an experimental album and is anything but.
#28 | / | Rolling Stone |
/ | AllMusic |
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