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Without even waiting until it had amassed a halfway-decent-sized discography, Coldplay recently made the call. In taking a calculated shortcut to gaining respectability as A Serious Artist, the British quartet wasn’t the first band to come down with a bad case of “Now what?”

The decision to make a Brian Eno album is in many ways the musical equivalent of a midlife crisis. Besides being a hipster band’s wet dream for hire, Eno is also a kind of Dr. Phil with a mixing console and actual worth.

In the early ’90s, a stuck-in-a-rut U2 went the full Bowie, grabbing Eno and heading to Berlin in what smelled like a carefully choreographed effort to recapture some of the miserable magic of the former Thin White Junkie’s famous Berlin Trilogy—presumably with better hotels and fewer drugs.

Eno didn’t actually produce Low, Heroes, or Lodger, but he helped shape them, cowriting some of the songs and adding a healthy dose of proto–new wave experimentation and sonic diddling to the proceedings.

U2 emerged from their Berlin romp with Achtung Baby and quickly teamed up again with Eno for 1993’s Zooropa, which, without previous coproducer Daniel Lanois, sounded even more like a Brian Eno album—with really expensive, big-shot sidemen. Coldplay skipped the Berlin shtick, yet with this year’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, coproduced by Arcade Fire engineer Markus Dravs, still managed to make an Eno album, just not a very good one.

It’s probably safe to assume that the guys in Coldplay weren’t bopping around one day to Devo’s 1978 debut album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, exclaiming, “We gotta get the guy who produced this!” So who knows what their expectations were.

I don’t know how these things work: do record labels still wield enough power to put the kibosh on too much “messing with the brand”, as it were, or is it possible that Eno gave Coldplay the sound he figured they deserved? I’m inclined to think the latter.

The album brings to mind 10 lifestyle-fellating TV-commercial soundtracks waiting to happen—no coincidence, since the title track was an iTunes ad before the album had even been released. That leaves plenty left over for shilling cars, coffee, beer, and/or tampons.

It’s as if Eno slyly purloined little chunks from all of his various musical incarnations and came up with something that sounds like Corporate Ambient World Rock, thereby pleasing everyone, but without any nasty side effects like surprise or amazement.

And punters can still throw all the same words around—textured, layered, evocative—and feel like they’re saying something, when in fact it sounds more like they’re talking about drapes or a fantastic and mysterious cake.

Eno may be on to something. He could even switch the equation around—the old “fucking the system up from the inside” ploy. Keep ’em guessing. If he’ll work with Coldplay, why not some pop product like Britney Spears? She’s so hopeless, he could probably convince her to do an album of ambient soundscapes: Music for Airheads. Or is that the title of her forthcoming career-retrospective boxed set?

How about a job with American Idol? The show could really use more references to generative music and the Fluxus movement. It needs more frapping synthesizers, sound collages, and way more avant-garde minimalism. Who are you going to call?