LIKE A KALEIDOSCOPE SONG FULL

Kaleidoscope, while named for a rather forgettable interlude track on A Head Full of Dreams, doesn’t sound so much like a direct follow-up to that album as it does a sort of time-travel experiment in which the old “still recognizable as a band” Coldplay and the new “we hang out with every big musical celebrity” Coldplay collide. And to that I say… well sure, there are some good songs on the Kaleidoscope EP, but I can’t see myself wanting to listen to all five of these tracks in a row the way I would with all ten or twelve tracks on one of Coldplay’s better albums once they do something new and most of the material here falls into the same cracks that most non-album songs do in my mental music database.

I’m not entirely sure what the point of this was, but then I’m one of the few oddball music fans who still seems to care how a collection of songs hangs together as a listening experience, more than I happen to care about how any one particular song captures the general public’s attention. And while we got our first warning shot of the new territory they were exploring when their collaboration with The Chainsmokers, “Something Just Like This”, was released several months ago, pretty much every other track slated for this EP saw some sort of a standalone release, even if just as a promotional single, before the full collection actually dropped at the end of July, after having its release date pushed back a few times. They’ve apparently entered a phase of their career where they want to release music in smaller doses and more often, hoping to stay culturally relevant, rather than releasing full albums all at once. But the band’s got a big enough global profile that pretty much anything they release gets massive amounts of hypes well before it actually drops. Does a new EP from Coldplay really warrant that much excitement, when it’s really just the leftover ideas that didn’t make it on to A Head Full of Dreams, which was a bit of a scattershot album in the first place when it was released a good year and a half ago? Eh, not really. Oh, sorry guys, I got a little overly excited there. In Brief: While I feel like this EP’s release was a bit overhyped, and I’m not inclined to trust rumors of the band having recorded their final album, there are some genuinely exciting new directions taken here that I’d love to see the band explore a little further… and also some embarrassing attempts at pop culture relevance that I wish they’d bury once and for all.ĬOLDPLAY HAS A NEW EP OUT! COLDPLAY HAS A NEW EP OUT! COLDPLAY HAS A NEW EP OUT! COLDPLAY HAS A NEW EP OUT! COLDPLAY HAS A NEW EP OUT!

Like a kaleidoscope song