Would you say it matches the quality of polarbears & clear-up?

Im a fairly new Snow Patrol fan, circa Eyes Open.

 

I love all their albums. This one is really really good. It is different in that its more upbeat than Eyes Open.

 

Its a good album, I was a huge Fan of Take Back The City, but now it seems like the weakest on the album. Take These Photos is amazing! And the Lighting Strike!

 

Im stoked for the tour. And I believe it is on par with their past stuff, but they need to change it up next go around.

Snow Patrol: One Hundred Million Suns

 

 

It's not often you can call an album unambitious when it closes with a 16-minute, three-part epic. But this is Snow Patrol, purveyors of Eyes Open, a band whose vaguely consoling Celtic rock is so unremarkable as to muffle such novelties. It is just there, more or less benign, like lint or leaf litter.

 

There is nothing radically wrong with their fifth album, which is an efficient update of their past two multi-platinum efforts. Straighter Patrol fans may baulk at the skitter of beats that play across 'The Golden Floor', a rare incursion from the producer Garret 'Jacknife' Lee's dance past. And brows might furrow during the Philip Glass-like piano longueurs in the thick of 'The Lightning Strike', the album's epic parting shot. Well, if Coldplay can graft a couple of songs together and call it a track (as they did on Viva la Vida) - Snow Patrol will have calculated - then so can we.

 

It says something about their confidence that they are releasing an album in the same year as Coldplay, a head-to-head that Snow Patrol - an ersatz Coldplay, remember - have avoided in the past.

 

There is nothing particularly right about One Hundred Million Suns either. It is a record that mopes and rouses, as of old. They haven't gone Eighties, like Keane. They haven't gone all (relatively) weird, like Coldplay. Instead, Snow Patrol play safe while hinting at ambition.

 

There are small innovations as well as 'The Lightning Strike'. Instead of writing exclusively about his star-crossed love life, Snow Patrol's calling card to universality, singer Gary Lightbody turns his attention to the vastness of the universe. Success has a way of making dicks out of otherwise reasonable indie rock musicians, so it's nice to see Snow Patrol's ubiquity prompting Lightbody to contemplate his own puniness - even if it results in an album title more suited to prog-rockers Muse.

 

'The Disaster Button', by contrast, tells of inhibitions lost at an endless aftershow party, a song with both a pulse and a moral compass.

 

The rest of the album, however, is arena mulch with go-deeper stripes.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/26/snow-patrol-review

I Absolutely love- Crack The Shutters, Disaster Button, The Planets Bend Between Us, Take Back The City and Set Down The Glass.... :love:

More slush from Snow Patrol

 

 

 

SNOW PATROL "A Hundred Million Suns" (Fiction/Geffen/Interscope)

 

Cast your eyes down the current Billboard album chart, and you won't find a single just-breaking U.K. band.

 

A few established ones may turn up - Coldplay, Radiohead and the still-huffing Oasis. Likewise, several slots go to solo British women, like Duffy, Leona Lewis and Natasha Bedingfield.

 

But good luck making it if you've got a funny accent and you're an untested male band from the other side of the Atlantic.

 

Last year, Snow Patrol beat all those odds to make it big here, even if it did so in a sneaky way. The group hails from Dundee, Scotland, and has roots in Northern Ireland. But from the sound of its music, you'd think the members just fell off a hayride in Iowa. The song they soared to fame on, "Chasing Cars," has the mushy comfort of American acts as dire as OneRepublic. It's ideal background music for TV medical dramas, a key way for songs to become hits these days.

 

Buoyed by "Cars," Snow Patrol's album "Eyes Open" went platinum in America and became the biggest-selling album of the year back home.

 

Now comes the follow-up, "A Hundred Million Suns," and it's every bit as milky and pale as its predecessor. The band's aptly named front man, Gary Lightbody, has a boyish and open voice that, admittedly, suits the romance of the music. Again, the band stresses pillowy ballads, anchored by pianos or acoustic guitars. Everything twinkles, or sputters mildly. In the group's loudest moments, it approaches the grandiosity of '80s rock from the British Isles, from Simple Minds to U2, but in a greatly planed-down form.

 

Lightbody does have a certain clean-cut appeal, and his tunes boast a pop competence, with their melodic hooks plainly stated. Also, the band seem to take one reach: a 16-minute finale. Too bad it amounts to three more modest songs smooshed into one.

 

Then again, Snow Patrol isn't about risk but about comfort. Ultimately, they're making '70s soft rock for a new era: It's this generation's answer to Air Supply.

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2008/10/26/2008-10-26_more_slush_from_snow_patrol.html

2 Stars?!?!?!?!?

2 Stars?!?!?!?!?

I dont think the reviews are worth a darn for this album... Its much much better than 2 stars!

I've checked out most reviews on the net and it's blindingly obvious most reviewers have never heard SFPB or Clear Up, and half of them have probably only heard the singles from Final Straw(?!)

I'm listening now, The Golden Floor really stood out.

 

It deserves more than 2 stars.

 

And yeah, a lot of people think that Final Straw was their FIRST album...! Imbeciles!

I've checked out most reviews on the net and it's blindingly obvious most reviewers have never heard SFPB or Clear Up, and half of them have probably only heard the singles from Final Straw(?!)

Its a shame, SFPB is an AMAZING album. I feel this band has really come into thier own with AHMS. I know that making accesible pop and song that are easy on the ears is looked down upon by most reviewers but I can think of ton of other acts in the states CONSTANTLY on the radio that are less talented in that departarnt.

There may never be another SP song as good as An Olive Grove Facing The Sea. This song just ticks all the right boxes for me, by far the most beautiful thing they have written to date. AND I have seen it live. That certainly separated the fans from the Chasing Cars brigade, I can tell you. Stunning.

 

Oh, and as far as albums go:

 

When It's All Over We Still Have To Clear Up > Final Straw = SFPB > A Hundred Million Suns > Eyes Open.

 

I'm not saying Eyes Open is bad, it's just that it pales in comparison to the other four.

What about - When Its All Over We Still Have To Clear Up?

 

Id rank them

 

FS

SFB

AHMS

EO Only listed a couple of times

WIAOWSHTCU never heard

When It's All Over We Still Have To Clear Up was first. :P

love them. They're amazing.

x2 post

When It's All Over We Still Have To Clear Up was first. :P

I need to listen to it. Is it really that good?

Yeah, it really is that good.

 

Quite a few Songs For Polar Bears-esque songs on it, as well as stuff that's a bit more stripped-down.

 

If you've watched the Live At Somerset House DVD, you should recognise Black And Blue, One Night Is Not Enough, and An Olive Grove Facing The Sea (which is the best thing they've written so far, like I said).

 

Not as accessible as their other stuff, but allow yourself to give it time, and you will be impressed.

 

Oh, and they've started playing On/Off live again. :D

Got my cd today. :dance:

The site I regularly use to read reviews All Music gave a hundred Million Suns 4/5 and an AMG Pick.

 

Now having the album 5 days. I love it. Or a few songs. Im addicted to The Lighting Strike. When Coldplay described 42 I imagined an Epic song like The Lighting Strike.

 

For me I love Eyes Open most, A Hundred Million Suns will grow on me more and more just like Viva did. I think AHMS will be underestimated for a long time. But its one of the best of the year.

Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody - interview

 

 

The band's songwriter Gary Lightbody tells Neil McCormick why their new, number-one album is tinged with romance.

 

In 2006, one group dominated British rock. It was the year of the Arctic Monkeys, when the Sheffield tyros came roaring out of MySpace with the fastest-selling debut album ever. They won four-star reviews, were plastered over magazine covers, inspired a chain of copycat bands, and were garlanded with end-of-year awards.

 

Yet, by the time the dust had settled, the biggest-selling band of the year turned out to be a little heralded, long-serving Scots/Irish outfit of geekish, unprepossessing scruffs turning 30, who had been knocking around since 1994, and had barely picked up a good review in the process.

 

Snow Patrol's fourth album, Eyes Open, shifted 1.6 million copies in the UK and more than four million worldwide. Their number one single, Chasing Cars, stayed in the UK charts for 85 weeks. "We were a 10-year overnight success," says frontman and principal songwriter, Gary Lightbody. "It was a shock to the system. But we're honest, and we're not shy about trying to connect with people. So I feel secure and justified in the world."

 

Snow Patrol's follow-up, A Hundred Million Suns, was released this week.

 

It is, in my view, an epic, widescreen, decidedly modern rock record (although that is not an opinion shared by many of my fellow critics). While most British rock seems in thrall to the past, Snow Patrol and longtime collaborator, maverick dance producer Jacknife Lee, create huge 21st-century sonic vistas, sparkling with ambient keyboards, glittering with digitally distorted guitar hooks.

 

"We make records with everything at our disposal, from things fresh out of the box to things that smell of mothballs," says Lightbody. Yet the songs themselves are almost unsophisticated in their basic form (which is perhaps what makes them so damn catchy), mainly constructed around repetitive chord patterns and two- or three-note riffs, with melodies that draw on keening Celtic blues modulations, lending a gentle intensity to Lightbody's poetic, introspective lyrics.

 

"My songwriting is very simplistic," says Lightbody. "What we do is melody and honesty, that is the core. I think the songs reach out as far as they do because people identify with it."

 

British critics have, for the most part, not been kind, branding them Coldplay-lite (which, given that Coldplay themselves are often portrayed as Radiohead-lite, is a particularly dismissive insult), purveyors of safe, soft, coffee-table rock. It has been hard on Lightbody, an obsessive music fan. As an impoverished, struggling musician, he was a central figure in Scotland's indie scene, with a side project as leader of the Reindeer Section, whose floating members included 47 musicians from 20 Scottish bands.

 

"I'm a crazy music consumer. I read the magazines, I like to know what's going on, but I just can't read anything about us any more. But what can you do? You make your peace with it and move on, or you just get so furious every time something happens you can't actually function as a human being."

 

The 32-year-old Northern Irishman (who formed Snow Patrol at university in Dundee) crackles with nervous energy, apparently finding it very hard to sit still. As obviously intelligent and eloquent as he is, he makes for a difficult interview subject, easy to like (he is modest, unassuming and friendly) but hard to pin down, with a tendency to try to joke his way out of deep or probing questions (something he sheepishly acknowledges). Yet, by his own accounts, he has become far more settled since his band's belated success.

 

"I was quite good at creating calamity. I don't know if it was success or just growing up. Maybe it was as simple as stopping drinking so much to look after my voice, but I have become more comfortable in my own skin. I have calmed down."

 

There may be another explanation. As even a cursory examination of the album would reveal, Lightbody is in love. This marks a huge departure, given that his entire recorded output to date has concerned his inability to sustain relationships.

 

"I've written six albums about break-ups, and I think that's enough for now. Maybe there was a faulty mechanism in me that drove relationships into the ground on purpose. It's much easier to write when you are feeling sad and self-pitying.

 

"But there's suffering for your art, and there's just plain stupidity. I had to know if I could write an album that had a happy ending. So it is a love record, celebrating a relationship rather than doing some kind of morbid autopsy. But I don't think it is saccharine at all. It's not doe-eyed or syrupy; it's a very real record about love in our time."

 

Lightbody's introspective oeuvre seems to have opened up with this album, infused with a new-found obsession with science (the album title alludes to our insignificance in the universe). "I have used writing mostly to try to figure out what went wrong with me. This time, because it was from a much more positive point of view, I was able to look outwardly. So the world became the context of this record, rather than my four walls."

 

The album's ambitious closer is a 16-minute, three-song segue, The Lightning Strike, which at times sounds like a gorgeous combination of Philip Glass sequencer patterns and primal drone rock. "I was caught in a really quite devastating storm in Glasgow one night, and I was pretty terrified - 150-mile-an-hour winds, trees falling down. But we went outside the house, and it was also just thrilling. There was this howling wind, but it felt like silence, as if our senses were being too bombarded to cope with what was going on. So the record was born out of that feeling, of two people having a protective shell around each other.

 

"I'm not saying there's not darkness in there still, but it's happening from outward factors more than inward. Maybe things are terrifying, but they're beautiful, too. The world is extremely surprising."

 

Snow Patrol's own journey has perhaps been the most surprising of all, from indie also rans to multi-million-selling potential world-beaters. "I'd like to think I'm learning from the mistakes I've made. At the very least, I've got better at judging when I'm about to make mistakes. That might come with maturity, but I think writing is part of it. It's not exactly therapy, its more documentation.

 

"I have wondered sometimes if it exacerbates problems. Having to sing certain songs every night, I find myself beating myself over the head with something I've done, apologised for and moved on from. But recently, when we are singing songs that are close to the bone, there are a few thousand people singing them back, and that puts a whole different slant on it. It makes it a positive, refreshing experience.

 

"So it's been a strange few years. But a wonderful few years."

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/30/bmsnow-patrol130.xml

22/02/09 Bournemouth - BIC

24/02/09 Glasgow - SECC

26/02/09 Aberdeen - AECC

28/02/09 Dublin - Point Depot

04/03/09 Sheffield - Hallam Arena

06/03/09 Liverpool - Arena

07/03/09 Manchester - MEN

08/03/09 Cardiff - Arena

10/03/09 Newcastle - Arena

11/03/09 Birmingham - NEC

12/03/09 Nottingham - Arena

14/03/09 London - O2

19/03/09 Belfast - Odyssey

 

Holy shit, yes? :D

Here's to hoping for a Canadian tour. I will be first in line!

love this album!!! just love it!

 

I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE TOUR HERE IN THE U.S.! C'MON LADS GET UR BUTTS OVER HERE! STAT!

Yeah, it really is that good.

 

Quite a few Songs For Polar Bears-esque songs on it, as well as stuff that's a bit more stripped-down.

 

If you've watched the Live At Somerset House DVD, you should recognise Black And Blue, One Night Is Not Enough, and An Olive Grove Facing The Sea (which is the best thing they've written so far, like I said).

 

Not as accessible as their other stuff, but allow yourself to give it time, and you will be impressed.

 

Oh, and they've started playing On/Off live again. :D

 

On/Off is such a beautiful song. One Night Is Not Enough is my favourite from that album.

Ive just downloade Songs For Polar Bears and When Its All Over etc etc. I cant wait to get into them! It seems that the long time fans really like these albums.