Melancholy ballads made Coldplay famous, but they’ve always been more than just another mopey bunch of Brits, particularly in concert. They proved that Saturday night during a wildly entertaining performance in front of a near-capacity crowd at U.S. Bank Stadium in downtown Minneapolis.

Lead singer Chris Martin and the rest of the band have always amplified their most upbeat material on the live stage, while turning sad songs into outsized anthems. Their current world tour, which launched in March 2016 and is set to wrap in November, stands as their biggest, brightest effort to date, with an emphasis on hope, enthusiasm and fun.

The band performed on three stages throughout the two-hour show. Big cloud-sized screens, banks of lights and pyro equipment ate up much of the massive stage, pushing the band up to the very front. The physical closeness of the four guys gave the show an unexpected intimacy inside the largest venue in the Twin Cities.

It was also the best-sounding show, by far, in USBS’s brief history. Thank the four towers of speakers that extended above the crowd at the back of the floor, as well as Live Nation’s decision to cover the seats behind the stage, which helped kill some of the venue’s notorious echo.

Martin spent much of the evening sprinting up and down the catwalk that extended halfway onto the stadium floor and ended with a small round stage the band used to play a trio of quieter tracks, “Always in My Head,” “Everglow” and their delicate masterpiece “Magic.” Later, Coldplay took to a third stage at the back of the floor for a few more slower numbers, including “Don’t Panic” with drummer Will Champion on vocals. (The catwalk also shot streams of confetti, in a rainbow of colors, onto the crowd several times during the show.)

During “The Scientist,” which Martin began alone at the piano, he sang a bit of “Raspberry Beret” and gave the Purple One another shout-out during “God Put a Smile Upon Your Face” when he crooned “I want to play in the place where Prince was born.”

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Martin – who may well be the most sincere superstar in the music business – thanked the crowd profusely for putting up with “all the shenanigans” it took for them to get to the show. He also said “If you feel love tonight, let’s send it out to all the places around the world that need it right now,” and mentioned the White House, Charlottesville and Pyongyang. But it wasn’t anything close to a political rant. Martin is a guy much more interested in uniting than dividing.

To that end, the band gave audience members high-tech wristbands that lit up at various times to the music, turning the crowd into an extension of the special effects. Martin dramatically stopped the band from playing “Charlie Brown” – a move he pulls every night – and urged the crowd to put away their phones “for just one song” and dance and jump along to the music.

Coldplay is the least cool band on the planet. The fact that they don’t care makes them such a joy to see live.