Their most unabashedly pop-centric and optimistic album to date, this sci-fi concept piece is the spiritual successor to technicolor predecessors Mylo Xyloto and A Head Full of Dreams - outpacing both with its sharp focus and lean runtime - while maintaining the boundary-pushing energy heard on the Kaleidoscope EP and Everyday Life. Expanding upon the band's question of "What would our music sound like across the universe?" they created a world filled with alien outcasts, invented languages, and fictional planets, freeing themselves from the bounds of earthly genre restrictions in the process. In fact, the song’s universality has turned it into an almost nondenominational and humanist hymn, blessed with an equivocal outlook that can magically give succor to all forms of love.Transmitting their stadium-sized pop anthems across an imaginary solar system, Coldplay go intergalactic with their shimmering ninth set, Music of the Spheres.
Combining the fatalism of lines like ‘what good would living do me’ with the use of God in the title was risky business back in the mid-’60s. Once that miasmic mix of harpsichords and celestial brass clears, and that opening caveat is laid bare, we’re left with a heartbreakingly tender song of yearning, of devotion and of fidelity.
The uncertainty of the first line (‘I may not always love you’) is a classic pop curveball, which works with the swooping transition from intro to verse. Three years later, Wilson and the Boys would surpass the master with a song that lifted the notion of the sophisticated love song clean into the heavens. In 1963, Brian Wilson was so obsessed with Phil Spector’s orchestral vision for the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ that he reportedly took to listening to it 100 times a day.
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