Up until Coldplay’s career-defining Glastonbury performance this year, Chris and the gang were floating in the purgatory between stadium slaying and dinner party soundtracking. It was a show so euphoric that even perpetual pessimist Noel Gallagher hailed it as the “gig of their lives”, while online all of the closet Coldplay fans crawled out of their self-imposed exile and into the Twittersphere, ignoring the fact they’d hated them for the last seven years and proudly proclaiming them to be the kings of Glastonbury. So does their new album live up to these towering expectations? ‘Mylo Xyloto’ begins where the vivacious ‘Viva La Vida’ left off. A short instrumental resonates like the shimmering dawn of a new day, before the Talk Talk bounce of ‘Hurts Like Heaven’ ignites, a vocoda-ing Martin chirping “You’re so cold, so cold”. It proves a bombastic buffer before the onslaught of berserk single ‘Paradise’. Initially a little cringe-worthy, ‘Paradise’ is a glossy, overproduced hip-hop-aping ballad so audacious it’d make the Lonely Island lads blush, but once you’ve shaken the image of Chris atop a cliff wearing a fur coat and nothing else, wind in his hair, arms thrust open, the celestial, chiming chorus will leave you ecstatic. Live favourite ‘Charlie Brown’ slots snugly into an ‘A Rush Of Blood To The Head’ groove, while ‘Major Minus’ defibrillates a sagging middle section; you can practically hear Johnny’s dusty guitar grinning as it channels the energy of ‘God Put A Smile Upon Your Face’. ‘Princess Of China’, the much-talked-about Rihanna duet, certainly blows the pants off Martin’s Jamelia collaboration, even if the chugging hip-rock (eek!) stomp sounds more like Coldplay featuring on a Rihanna song rather than the other way around. As the album starts to run out of steam you get the sense that the surfeit of creative ideas surging through it needs stemming and, unlike ‘Viva La Vida’, this new LP certainly feels like everyone (including producers Markus Dravs, Daniel Green, Rik Simpson and, of course, Brian Eno) has had their own flick of paint on this Pollock-esque canvas. Spectacularly self-indulgent it may be, but when Coldplay are this absurdly ambitious, it’s hard to pretend they’re anything shy of impressive.

Harriet Gibsone