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Chris Martin, Coldplay: 'Maudlin grandiosity' at Linc

If, like me, you think Chris Martin and his band, Coldplay, outlived their usefulness roughly five albums ago, you would have felt like the odd man out in an adoring capacity crowd of 69,000-and-change diehard Coldplay enthusiasts Saturday night at Lincoln Financial Field. It turns out that Coldplay's maudlin grandiosity still puts behinds in seats, a lot of behinds.

Coldplay's Chris Martin performs at Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday, Aug. 6, 2016.
Coldplay's Chris Martin performs at Lincoln Financial Field on Saturday, Aug. 6, 2016.Read moreSTEVEN M. FALK / Staff Photographer

If, like me, you think Chris Martin and his band, Coldplay, outlived their usefulness roughly five albums ago, you would have felt like the odd man out in an adoring capacity crowd of 69,000-and-change diehard Coldplay enthusiasts Saturday night at Lincoln Financial Field. It turns out that Coldplay's maudlin grandiosity still puts behinds in seats, a lot of behinds.

Riding the razor-thin line between crowd-pleasing showmanship and shameless pandering right down the middle, Coldplay opened its show at the Linc with its trademark overwrought spectacle, the rockets' red glare of fireworks arching over the stadium as a strobe-flashed blizzard of confetti rained down on the ecstatic crowd.

In a step reminiscent of the eye-dazzling maximalist choreography of Olympic ceremonies and North Korean pep rallies, everyone was issued a luminescent wristband that flashed different colors for each song, apparently responding to commands from a technician in some undisclosed location. When Coldplay kicked off its set with the celebratory title track of its new album, Head Full of Dreams, the Linc was a sea of pulsing red lights. When Coldplay followed it up with a victory lap through "Yellow," its touchstone song, the home of the Eagles was a sea of pulsing yellow chiffon.

"I can't tell you how happy we are to be in the City of Brotherly Love," declared frontman Martin, who, for reasons unclear, ran around the Linc all night with an American flag hanging out of his back pants pocket.

"We are going to put on the best show we have ever put on!" he declared. For the next two hours, Martin and Co. assayed the high-water marks of their back catalog. Highlights included the beatific mopery of the aforementioned "Yellow," the Olympics montage-worthy "Clocks," the Woody Guthrie-esque benediction of "Til Kingdom Come," and an unexpected acoustic reading of Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia."

Lowlights included the unforgivably bad digital imagery fractal-ing on three large screens behind the band all night long; the Trump-ian USA! USA! USA! chant that broke out in section 131 after "Kaleidoscope"; the insufferably inane "Hymn for the Weekend," the desultory cover of David Bowie's "Heroes," and "Sky Full of Stars," a date movie of a song, during which Martin triumphantly thrust two fists in the air as if he were Rocky Balboa while pirouetting beneath a steady drizzle of strobe-flashed confetti.

Still, Martin means well - despite the gilded opulence of Coldplay's music, the band is still populist at heart. Before the band took the stage, it played Charlie Chaplin's rousing and still-relevant-76-years-later power-to-the-people speech from The Great Dictator. And Martin is still principled enough to bite the hand that feeds when conscience and circumstance demand it, at one point mocking the confiscatory pricing of the Linc's concession stands. "I always wondered why so many people tailgate at Eagles games," he said between songs. "And then I got a look at the price of food and water, and now I know why everyone eats and drinks in the parking lot."