Album Review: Coldplay - A Head Full Of Dreams

British band Coldplay are like comfort food. You can never bring yourself to fully examine their ingredients, and you usually turn to them in a moment of weakness. Their packaging changes slightly, but there's always safety in their unchanging nature. After last year's sombre Ghost Stories and lead singer Chris Martin's public divorce from Gwyneth Paltrow, the band return with their kaleidoscopic and triumphant seventh studio album, A Head Full Of Dreams. It's another multicoloured and oversaturated album from the group, as Martin tries to fully exorcise troubling spectres from his everyman psyche.

For everything Martin's said in interviews about accepting the good with the bad, and the references to Persian poetry he's sprinkled throughout the album, it's then a shame that it then still feels like the overcompensating and polar opposite to Ghost Stories. Lacking any real spectrum of emotions or diversity, Martin instead returns to the same sweet nothings he's peddled on previous releases, with lines like, "We are diamonds taking shape," on Adventure Of A Lifetime sounding predictably familiar.

Norwegian production duo Stargate lend the album it's wheeling sound, and Guy Berryman's bass playing further invigorates things with energetic dance grooves; however, for all its aspirations towards invoking a club atmosphere on tracks like Hymn For The Weekend, the whole album ends up sounding more the type of music that would be played at a very tame surrealist art exhibition than a sweaty basement, featuring the type of tropes you'd expect to read printed on merchandise in a tie-dye shop. It's more of the same from the world's most comfortable rock band.