A build and a breakdown: they’ve done everything right here. An arpeggiated synth! We are at the kluhb! Sidechain gate on the processed hi-hat - it’s all here. At the midway point, there is a thickening, a tumescence, over wordless singing in the stratosphere, which then expertly melts back into the polyphonic (Imogen) heap of textures, and then, obviously, straight into four-on-the-floor, but so satisfying. “Midnight” is super exciting to me because it sort of doesn’t do anything - there isn’t really a structure so much as a sequence of concentric circles surrounding the same chord. The voice comes in like that Imogen Heap song we all bought the shit out of - what was that called, “Hide and Seek?” Love that song. “Midnight” begins with a looped and rhythmic texture. There is a string arrangement that is disappointingly on the nose: it moves at exactly the same time as the chords, so why is it there? It’s like having a giant picture of your body printed on your body instead of wearing clothes.
#Always in my head coldplay album how to
It’s sort of a handbook of how to use one’s entire range. They start high, in the falsetto range, and slither down through various passages and rooms and end in a conversational baritone. I’m really unclear about the merits of calling your song “True Love.” It has processed beds of strings, and a pointedly uneven vocal performance - Martin approaches the microphone from various angles, and shows his work, and one gets a sense of the challenges of his range in the slightly liquid phrase endings. Martin tries, here, several variations, ranging from “yeh” to “yoo” to the slightly Texan possibilities of “yew.” He performs a moist sandhi on “but you,” rendering it slightly more like “butt chew,” for what it’s worth. I sort of can’t bear anybody setting the word “you,” which is difficult in the English language, but we seem to be stuck with it. In “Magic,” we get a taste of electronic drums and a bass moving in 10ths, and gloriously, the voice is presented in an unaffected and straightforward way, and we can really hear the grain of Chris Martin’s voice, by which I mean all the little tics and rasps that make us human. Incidentally, if you squint at the cover art, it looks like a very specific piece of Sigur Rós merch I think I have it on a tote bag somewhere.
There is no other thing to do at the chorus than to bring back that guitar loop, so here it is! It is very satisfying. It unfolds perfectly, like a row house: there is no other place for the toilet to go, so obviously it goes there, at the top of the stairs. The album begins with “Always in My Head,” which features one of these Lovingly Borrowed from Sigur Rós textures, a sort of processed thing that contains voices (did they use one of them little Casio keyboards that enjoy such cachet in certain circles?), and then a looped guitar with delay over a plodding bass line. The musical phrases are similar: listen to the hook that begins “Ink” - it’s a little curlicue of a phrase that could only do one thing, and it does it confidently. The rhymes are so symmetrical, so square, that you can predict the end of the line based on the first word alone. I don’t mean this in a snarky way it is unchallenging in the way a conversation with an old friend always has an ease and fluency to it. What I like about this new album, Ghost Stories, the band’s sixth, is how unchallenging it is.
For that reason, when I smell a texture taken pretty explicitly from Sigur Rós or Arcade Fire, it feels like a lateral homage rather than the ugly “who did it first” business we suffer through in the discourses surrounding borrowing from people who are, perhaps, slightly less paid. There is something inherently honest-seeming about their faces, and I liked how once they got paid, they could afford to steal (in the most loving way) from other bands who also got paid - there is something much less offensive, I think, about people who own homes with nice linens and stuff taking artistic cues from other people who own homes with nice linens. This is a repost from The Talkhouse, originally published May 20, 2014.
0 kommentar(er)
