My Coldplay.com

The soulless Target Center seemed an unlikely location for an experience that has been deemed “orgasmic,” “spiritually moving,” and “F-ing awesome” by Macalester students. However, last Tuesday the vast stadium filled mostly with people to whom I would normally not give the time of day (before the concert I had the pleasure of hearing a detailed list of all the girls the guys behind me wanted to “get with,” including “Josh’s girlfriend from last year”) was the site of one of the best concerts I have ever attended.

This could be because my love for Coldplay knows no bounds, or it could be because I spent $50 on my ticket and was bound and determined to make it worth it. Yet, I strongly suspect it was because Coldplay put on an amazing performance. I say amazing because it takes great skill to mesmerize some 15,000 people for two hours by playing a set of songs that all sound more or less the same. Several times I found myself thinking, “Ooh, this song! I LOVE this one,” only to discover it was another song. “Oh well,” I thought, “I love this one too.”

Let’s be honest here: many Coldplay songs sound the same. But when that sound is beautiful, who am I to complain? They played many songs from their new album, X&Y, which seems to fit the general Coldplay mold of similar-sounding songs that leave the listener feeling warm and sated. It’s kind of like eating a lot of oatmeal raisin cookies: they all taste the same, you feel full afterwards, and you tell yourself they’re good for you because they have oatmeal and raisins in them. A few particularly memorable songs off the new album included “Swallowed In the Sea” and “Talk”. They also played many songs from previous albums, several of which, they claimed, they hadn’t played for years, including “Green Eyes”, “Everything’s Not Lost”, “Trouble”, “The Scientist”, and “In My Place.”

Tuesday’s concert, which was attended by at least a score of Mac students, wasn’t simply an aural experience. While at times I found the galactic images, wandering bears and close-ups of Chris Martin’s (hot) face that were almost were sporadically projected on the huge screen behind the band distracting, most of the visual aspects of the performance enhanced the overall experience. During “Yellow,” for example, about two-dozen large yellow balloons drifted majestically down from the ceiling. They crowd-surfed a few minutes before popping, showering the crowd with golden glitter.

Chris Martin’s constant frolicking was another source of great amusement. Throughout the entire performance, he leapt around the stage like a dervish, which would have been peculiar and distracting had he not seemed so genuinely blissful. He seemed to reflect the audience’s enthusiasm for what for them must have been a special occasion, but for him was just another concert after many weeks of grueling touring. He seemed to absorb the audience’s excitement and reflect it back into the farthest reaches of the arena. At times, the excitement seemed too much for some, including one fan who leapt onstage and was promptly nabbed by a security guard. The fans behind me got so caught up in the moment that when I sat down (for like two seconds, mind you) they yelled, “What the fuck are you sitting down for? Stand the **** up! This is f-ing Coldplay. You don’t sit down for this s***.” The way I saw it, this s*** was the s***, standing up or sitting down. But if you missed the show, don’t cry yourself to sleep; you can buy the album and fall asleep to that instead.

MacWeekly