A Head Full of Dreams ... might be Coldplay's brightest album ever – an eagle's-wings whoosh of soaring melodies, happy dance beats and Martin at his most wide-eyed.
On the band's seventh album, A Head Full of Dreams, Chris Martin and company nervously creep onto the dancefloor, like boys at a junior high school prom, determined to unleash the boogie, white man's overbite be damned.
Under the stewardship of Chris Martin, Coldplay cheerfully embrace the cheese, ratcheting up both the sparkle and the sentiment so the album feels genuine in its embrace of eternal middle-aged clichés.
The album doesn’t always work, but more often than not it sounds enough like vintage Coldplay to satisfy both diehards and casual listeners.
If there’s a wavelength on which Head is particularly powerful, though, it’s not easily apparent — it plays more like an unenthused rediscovery of past prizes than an album with its own specific code to be unlocked.
A Head Full of Dreams might have been a poptimist masterpiece. Instead, it's just another Coldplay album, with all the baggage — both positive and negative — that entails.
Martin’s inability to write in anything other than cliches and generalisations feels like a small mercy rather than a black mark.
If A Head Full of Dreams doesn't match the quartet's one unimpeachable triumph, 2008's Viva la Vida…, it nonetheless turns around Coldplay's downwards trajectory in the years since. Less wild with abandon than happily loose, they sound like a rock band stylistically at ease with the times.
Everyone loves a great smile, but A Head Full Of Dreams doesn’t have any teeth.
The majority of the track list is made up of songs that run far too long, have beyond cringe worthy concepts and lyrics or simply sound too unoriginal to stand out from the others.
Martin puts on the confetti-spewing Technicolor dreamcoat he discarded for 2014’s downer Ghost Stories and returns on the band’s 7th studio release with a rejuvenated spirit.
Coldplay returns with a vibrant, danceable followup to last year's Ghost Stories.
For all the record's eclecticism, Coldplay remain a band that put the "us" in "obvious," blowing up the simplest sentiments for maximum appeal.
It’s clear that the group are in a kind of creative stasis, eager to attempt new ideas but afraid to ultimately break with the past.
Neither noble experiment nor fitting farewell, A Head Full Of Dreams is a disappointing dud from a band that deserves a better send-off.
So despite leading with a song called “Adventure of a Lifetime”, Dreams gives us none of that: no real risk, no real adventure, and surprisingly little fun or catharsis.
A Head Full of Dreams ... sounds like a well-studied, rigid, demographic-conscious impression of Coldplay, empty as a consequence.
A Head Full of Dreams is insufferably bland at best and downright offensive at worst.
This project is one of my least favourite Coldplay records since it's overwhelmed with clichés, but I still have a weird amount of nostalgia attached to it. I remember listening to this album for the first time shortly after its release as I was on vacation, and I was walking a beach with crappy headphones making it difficult to hear. I entered a quiet area for "Everglow" and that track blew my mind, serving as a balladry melodic bridge between this project's two explosive ... read more
My head is full of nightmares after listening to this lol
Ouccchhhhhhhhhhh this one hurts. This album tries so hard to be colorful, that it ends up not being colorful and yeah that's the main problem with this album. It's sometimes cheesy, and most of the time it's boring. Some of the instrumentals and switch ups are actually terrible, like on Army Of One. And other times, there is literally nothing interesting with the instrumental at all. Like at least their other albums were full of life. ... read more
1. A Head Full of Dreams - 6/10
2. Birds - 5/10
3. Hymn for the Weekend - 8.5/10 ⭐
4. Everglow - 5/10
5. Adventure of a Lifetime - 5.5/10
6. Fun - 6/10
7. Kaleidoscope - N/A
8. Army of One - 4/10
9. Amazing Day - 4/10
10. Color Spectrum - N/A
11. Up&Up - 3/10
47/90
5.2/10 (Meh 5.0-5.9)
The Coldplay Defender Saga: Episode 7
We've finally arrived at the first Coldplay album I'm more mixed on. The highlights here are still the usual Coldplay quality, but a lot of tracks were just plain boring. It's still produced immaculately and I still like hearing Chris's voice, but I'm hoping they take more risks on the other records I've yet to spin
Favorite Track: Hymn for the Weekend
Least Favorite Track: Everglow
1 | A Head Full of Dreams 3:43 | 75 |
2 | Birds 3:49 | 73 |
3 | Hymn for the Weekend 4:18 | 79 |
4 | Everglow 4:42 | 69 |
5 | Adventure of a Lifetime 4:23 | 83 |
6 | Fun 4:27 feat. Tove Lo | 64 |
7 | Kaleidoscope 1:51 | 53 |
8 | Army of One 6:16 Contains hidden track "X Marks the Spot" | 55 |
9 | Amazing Day 4:31 | 63 |
10 | Colour Spectrum 1:00 | 48 |
11 | Up&Up 6:45 | 74 |
#9 | / | People |
#24 | / | Variance |
#29 | / | Entertainment Weekly |
#35 | / | NME |