Snow Patrol - A Hundred Million Suns

(Muso's Guide, November 27, 2008)

(POLYDOR)

Heavily accented vocals are a toughie. Who could deny affecting an oirish brogue when taking off ‘Fairytale Of New York’ a la McGowan? Or dusting off the Auchtermuchty burr for a closing time rendition of ‘(I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles’ like the bespectacled Reid twins?

In truth, it’s not really Gary Lightbody’s fault that the Norn Iron accent is the least alluring of them all, as evinced by Neil Hannon. Why else would Ken Branagh have fought so hard to break free of its shackles? And so it is that listeners must listen to Lightbody’s “har nar brawn car” vowels before even thinking of the musical advances on this, the fifth album from the Celtic (Scots and NI) quintet.

A Hundred Million Suns comes off the back of 2006’s five times platinum Eyes Open, so the heat is truly on here. It seems that they start out where Eyes Open left off - with radio-friendly unit-shifting stadium rock. And who could blame them? There’s clearly a market for this stuff. The album opener, ‘If There’s A Rocket, Tie Me To It’, clearly works on the premise that elegiac is best. Chiming guitars guide the ear into an expertly woven soundscape of swooning choruses and bizarrely immature lyrics. The tale of young love - through shared pulses and spaces - boasts a naivety which causes blushes with every gauche step into a sixth former’s poetry journal. Here, as on the rest of the album, the band merrily plow Editors’ musical furrow, all big gestures and windmilling guitars.

On ‘Crack the Shutters’, Lightbody channels Ricky Ross from Deacon Blue, spouting romantic rhetoric against a surefire soundtrack hit. Leader single ‘Take Back The City’, all radio-friendly saturation play and top-tapping pop - is decidedly singable, but disjointed in the extreme. The chorus and verses are welded together like a messy cut’n’shut, jarring with each note. That doesn’t take away from its surefire ‘hit’ status, sure to be an anthem for the Wetherspoons generation as ‘A Design For Life’. ‘Lifeboats’ sees Lightbody-as-male-Dido, conducting his vocal as dispassionately as a man who is waiting for a bus. His words speak of emotion, but his tone speaks of the number 29.

It’s not that Snow Patrol haven’t tried to move on from Eyes Open. ‘The Golden Floor’ kicks off, unbelievably, with some sort of world music drumbeats, whilst ‘Please Just Take These Photos From My Hands’ has a nice line in pop which wouldn’t shame a self-regarding boyband these days. Lightbody’s voice is making the move into a richer, more mature territory, and it is great to hear. On ‘Lifeboats’, it is at times sonorous, and the journey to accomplished rock singer has taught him a few tricks. But by the same token, one would assume that they might have picked up some eloquent lyricism in all these years. Newsflash: they haven’t. Phrases like “surplus reprieve” and “cool your beans, son” are unfortunate, while the simile which likens “veins” to “great forest trees” is truly a new low in songwriting.

The truth in all of this is that Snow Patrol know that they found a terrific niche in Eyes Open and in Final Straw and they know better than anyone how foolish they would be to move away from that too soon at too high a speed. For the meantime, they’re basking in the light of A Hundred Million Suns. Let’s hope they lose that accent by the time the next record comes around.