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ACL Fest review: Coldplay
A few years ago in an article about sign language interpreters at music festivals, Austin resident and touring interpreter Barbie Parker talked about the relative difficulty of preparing to interpret for different kinds of artists. A legacy artist like Bob Dylan was a nightmare because of the deep canon and unpredictable setlist, while rappers presented a two-pronged problem because of speed of delivery and the multitude of plays on words and other lyrical devices that don’t translate gracefully to sign language.
You could learn something by watching the interpreters from Austin’s Lotusign do their work Saturday night while British rock band Coldplay banged out a grandiose, hit-after-hit-filled and consummately professional 90 minutes at Austin City Limits Festival. Mainly that the band is a gang of literal and lyrical generalists to the extreme, pretty much absent of metaphor, verbal trickery or allusion, with enough symbolism and personification (keys are held, clocks are watched, people are lost, etc.) to keep every set of lyrics from being “I used to be in love, and now I’m not” ad infinitum.
This insight about the band is hardly a revelation and as our great recent “defense” of the curiously maligned band points out, a big key to Coldplay’s success is the incredible accessibility of their lyrics, almost to the point of being musical comfort food for the loved, loveless and pretty much everyone who’s somewhere in between. But watching singer Chris Martin’s lyrics presented in a physical form with sweeping, easy motions - versus the near gymnastics demanded by a combo like Nas and Damian Marley earlier in the evening, or the arcane literary references of a band like The Decemberists - drove the point home in a new way; these are wide-open ideas populated by stock characters (God, devils, angels, children and “you” make up the bulk) in service of incredibly basic motivations. Inanimate object + verb + direct object + a U2- or Cure-sized melody = pretty much every Coldplay song ever written.
So it’s no wonder to find Coldplay on a headliner stage on a big festival like ACL and others all over the world. You pretty much can’t fit a song like “Viva La Vida” into a place with less than a five-figure capacity (though they tried pretty successfully Thursday night at an Austin City Limits television taping), “Yellow” soars high enough to scrape the heavens… everything the band does is big. Like book them for halftime of Super Bowl LX big. And clearly they’re comfortable projecting these songs in massive fashion. From the opening pulses of the new “Hurts Like Heaven” through to the end Martin bounded around the stage when he wasn’t behind a piano or guitar, reaching out the crowd (no one makes yearning as palatable as these guys) and delivered what is really a startling collection of hits for a band that’s been banging around for just over a decade.
Saturday found the foursome in a comfort zone, doing what they’ve done scores of times at this point and checking all the boxes you’d need them to fill as the night’s co-headliner. There were tastes of the upcoming album “Mylo Xyloto,” familiar songs given new colors (the closing of “God Put A Smile Upon Your Face was massive) and humorous asides like in “Everything’s Not Lost” about all the women in the audience wanting to see Coldplay while all the boys they were with really wanted to see Kanye West across the park. In all, enough new flourishes and surprises to keep it from feeling like a paying-the-bills hit parade.
It wasn’t a set that caused audience members to re-examine how they think about music as a whole as they filtered out of the park, but that’s never this band’s intent to begin with. Faces smiling, hands red from clapping and throats strained thanks to choruses so ingrained that singing to them is almost autonomic behavior, they left happy from seeing exactly what they had expected would be put before them, served up big and gulped down whole.
Set list:
- Hurts Like Heaven
- Yellow
- In My Place
- Major Minus
- Lost
- The Scientist (corrected)
- Violet Hill
- God Put A Smile Upon Your Face
- Everything’s Not Lost
- Us Against The World
- Politik
- Viva La Vida
- Charlie Brown
- Paradise
(encore)
- Clocks
- Fix You (preceded by verse and chorus of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”)
- Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall
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By living
September 17, 2011 8:06 AM | Link to this
No mention of the insane bleed from the stage across the park - so loud we couldn’t hear Chris talking and his quieter songs got drowned out. I also think Mavis was impacted by the Pretty Lights noise - felt like the bleed was worse this year.
By ACLvet
September 17, 2011 8:44 AM | Link to this
The sound bleed has been very bad since the first festival, but has been especially noticeable this year. This is largely because after ten years C3 still hasn’t learned to mix sound without turning the bass up to eleven, but the Mavis Staples set was affected by even the high end from the Pretty Lights show.
However, since many festival-goers prefer to talk and text non-stop during sets and the media critics get to hear the sets from very close to the stage, I don’t expect this will change any time soon.
By Will
September 17, 2011 9:45 AM | Link to this
I’m gonna assume “Nobody Said It Was Easy” is supposed to be “The Scientist”. Unless it’s some new song.
By ILikeThem
September 20, 2011 11:19 AM | Link to this
I wasn’t there, but I’ve seen them live and they are very good. I get the sense that like many reviewers, the more popular a band is the more you have to show some kind of disdain. It sounds like if they were an unknown Austin band playing all the same songs, the reviewer were think they were brilliant.