Coldplay brings soaring anthems, stunning visuals to AT&T Stadium
Coldplay performs at AT&T Stadium during a stop on its “A Head Full of Dreams” tour on Aug. 27, 2016. Roman A. Pena Special to the Star-Telegram
BY PRESTON JONES
In the darkness of AT&T Stadium, Charlie Chaplin’s voice echoed: “The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.”
The precursor to Coldplay’s first North Texas performance in four years — an audio clip from Chaplin’s landmark 1940 film The Great Dictator — served a few purposes: Setting the table for a mesmerizing two-hour showcase; underlining the British foursome’s enduring altruistic streak, and highlighting what has been, on balance, a relatively miserable year for humanity.
But as Chris Martin, Will Champion, Jonny Buckland and Guy Berryman repeatedly demonstrated Saturday night, during the sold-out and aggressively Dallas-branded stop of their ongoing “A Head Full of Dreams” tour, even the darkest moments can be overcome, however briefly, by the light.
Coldplay has long been a band knocked for its heart-on-sleeve optimism, coupled with its earnest, stadium-ready anthems, but there is genuine catharsis in feeling 40,000 voices or so belting the choruses to Fix You or Paradise or A Sky Full of Stars, as confetti and balloons and lasers and fire and sparks rain down upon everyone.
To witness a Coldplay concert is see, feel and hear ebullience made manifest — even the more subdued moments, such as Saturday’s acoustic interludes, which reached all the way back to the band’s earliest days for Don’t Panic and In My Place, hum with an almost palpable energy.
And as Martin noted near the conclusion of Saturday’s show, Coldplay is verging on being a veteran act: “In a week’s time, we’ll have been together for 20 years,” a sweat-drenched Martin explained. “I’m grateful to be in the same band, with the same people.”
That Coldplay is as capable of marshaling as formidable a live showing at this stage of its career as it was 15 years ago speaks to the considerable abilities of all involved. The quartet managed to do what very few acts that have played AT&T Stadium can do: shrink the room. There were times Saturday when it seemed as if the vast expanses of AT&T Stadium were nothing more than a 2,000-seat theater.
From the opening song, A Head Full of Dreams, the band was deploying every weapon in the 21st century arena concert arsenal — a blitzkrieg of lights and special effects (including “xylobands,” handed out to attendees upon entering and which lit up in sync with the music), buttressing, rather than supplanting the music, itself given lift by Martin’s elastic tenor and Buckland’s chiming riffs.
Those songs, and the sentiments behind them, betray none of the cynicism often inherent in the music often made at the level of Coldplay’s success.
Such honesty is only helped by the delivery of the indefatigable Martin (name another superstar frontman who would flub the lyrics to one of the band’s hits — in this case, Adventure of a Lifetime — and breezily start over, copping to the screw-up), whose exertions feel less like overachieving than merely a visceral need to connect with every last person in the room.
Coldplay has been around long enough to witness its fair share of misery and bitterness, and every other ugly human emotion. (A poignant moment Saturday involved Martin asking the audience to “spread some goodwill” to places rocked by misfortune around the world, whether that was Baton Rouge or Italy or elsewhere.)
Yet, instead of succumbing to humanity’s worst, Coldplay — a rock band eternally fueled by both its aspirational nature and its approachability — sees only the best, the parts of us that lift and sail and soar, spinning in the breeze like flecks of confetti, mingling with the lights until it’s hard to know where the beautiful colors begin or end.
Preston Jones: 817-390-7713, @prestonjones
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