Any young person who has ever taken a trip anywhere with friends can relate to the latest music video from Coldplay, "Birds." The latest A Head Full of Dreams utilizes kaleidoscopic, psychedelic imagery for maximum visual effect.
Capturing grainy images of a tour bus, late night sparklers and dances on the beach, Coldplay manages to capture just about all the troupes of a classic young-adult adventure novel as well as the hippie notions of Burning Man.
Marcus Haney directed the video shot at California's Salvation Mountain, which reads the words of Bible verses and Christian saying painted by the late artist Leonard Knight. Coldplay stands directly on the main portion of the mural, which reads, "God is Love," while Chris Martin wears his usual baggy cargo pants and squats and kneels amongst the rest of the band, looking dazed and confused at his antics.
Quotes almost subliminally shown throughout the video such as "We are all born to live but few of us ever do," come off as the idealistic calls for adventure that certainly appeal to a certain demographic. But, at 38 years old, one might think Martin would have grown out of the childish sense of adventure that comes with dancing in a desert barefoot and move on to more adult vestiges of life.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Martin called A Head Full of Dreams the band's hippie album, and this video certainly captures that mentality. Although, that message seems to have been muddled in the delivery given that critics have been harsh on the album, which currently holds a Metacritic score of 60/100.
It's also the band's first album of its last five to not reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, largely because it's blocked at No. 2 by Adele's 25.
