“In Africa the rivers are perfectly deep and perfectly wide,” he sings in “Èkó,” practically begging us to picture him in a pith helmet. (Other guests include Tiwa Savage, a Nigerian singer Beyoncé also drafted for her “Lion King” album pop super-producer Max Martin and Chris Martin’s 13-year-old son, Moses, who gets a co-writing credit on “Orphans.”) Then there’s the delicate “Èkó,” which openly invites comparisons to the work of an earlier traveler, Paul Simon, whom Coldplay evokes again in “Old Friends.”īut where Simon in his lyrics always seemed determined to catch something of the complexity of the place he was visiting, Martin can be awfully simplistic in these songs - a problem in any context but especially on an album otherwise marked by some of his most nuanced words. The gorgeous “Bani Adam” benefits from a sample of a piece by the Nigerian composer Ikoli Harcourt Whyte “ Arabesque,” with a blaring saxophone solo by Femi Kuti, gathers a swaggering momentum we’ve never heard from Coldplay. But even as he became a real-deal celebrity, Martin’s presentation remained nice-guy opaque.Īnd musically, at least, that journey paid off. Martin began back in the “ Yellow” days by re-scaling U2’s “The Joshua Tree” to student-union dimensions over time the group slowly went bigger and slicker, eventually racking up collaborations with the likes of Rihanna and the Chainsmokers. made the same point nearly 30 years ago.īut if Coldplay has endured by dispensing a kind of all-purpose reassurance - it remains, two decades after it emerged from Britain’s post-Radiohead sweepstakes, one of the few non-boomer guitar acts capable of filling stadiums - Martin actually spends much of the band’s eighth LP pushing past the feel-good generalities that made him rock’s cuddliest heartthrob. “Everyone hurts / Everyone cries,” the singer goes on, which of course is no less true today than it was when R.E.M. Lush with creamy keyboards and gently arcing guitar licks, the music around him is just what we’ve come to expect from this weighted blanket of a rock band - as quintessentially Coldplay as that opening couplet, which is vague enough to encompass any trauma a listener might bring to it. “What in the world are we going to do?” Coldplay’s Chris Martin asks to start the title track of his group’s new double album, “Everyday Life.” “Look at what everybody’s going through.”