Album Review: Snow Patrol's A Hundred Million Suns

Snow Patrol don't seem to do space. Silence. It's always a wall of some sort of sound. Though I guess this structural complexity is their signature, sometimes your ears would be glad for a break, just some sort of break. It would be a far more effective method of creating contrast to introduce some gaps, some of moments of far less clutter.

In listening to their latest album A Hundred Million Suns, I have mixed feelings. Initially I diagnosed it a s same old, same old. There was nothing that stood out as immediately brilliant to me. But then, I think about my exposure to the last album, Eyes Open. There were only two songs on that one that stood out to me, however I ended up loving the entire thing through constantly exposing myself to it. The hook seems to be in the poetry of the lyrics more than the song construction. Once you're familiar with the words, the other nuances seem to come out, too.

Track 3 - Take Back the City
Ah, the single. The guitar introduction to this is quite nice and spacey, which I complained about a lack of overall. The vocals, especially within the verses, are less whiney than normal. This, I think, is because singer Gary Lightbody ventures into the lower range a little more often. This is something I would like to hear more often throughout. Swapping the registers also gives more contrast to the verse.
Both verses and chorus have a relentless quaver strumming in the guitar part, bordering upon the boring, but relieved extremely well by the use of a completely different rhythm for a prechorus. The prechorus is long enough to serve as a break from the relentless strumming -rive of the verse and chorus.

Track 5 - The Golden Floor
How blatantly annoying. This song starts off with a nice little fingerpicked chordal motif on an steel-string guitar. We hear it once, for four bars, before it is overlayed with a percussion motif that would be more appropriate to some pop trash that Shakira would pump out. It stays there, unchanged, throughout choruses and verses until the final eight bars of sound, where we are once again teased with the gorgeous guitar part that could have been.

Track 7 - Set Down Your Glass
A nice, slow, potentially beautiful song. This is where I am having difficulty with the constant background sound that this band insists on. I wonder does the keyboardist, Tom Simpson, feel he needs to justify his presence within the band by providing some sort of humming wash in the background of absolutely everything? This gorgeous song would have been much better presented as purely vocals and steel-string guitar.
I think this is something that bands have to learn from orchestral composers - especially this run of emo/indie bands that proliferate at the moment. Just because you have a wide breadth of musical sounds and effects at your fingertips it does not mean you have to use them all at once. A sensitivity and interplay between instruments - a conversation/contrast approach - is far more effective that having all voices speak over each other at once.

Track 11 - The Lightning Strike: (i)What If This Storm Ends? / (ii) The Sunlight Through The Flags / (iii) Daybreak
What an epic! I love the emphasis on the piano within this piece as a whole.
In the first section (i) What If This Storm Ends, the building of rhythms over the initial piano part is brilliant. Vocally, the same melodic idea is used throughout to great effect. It's a captivating melodic motif, mesmerising just like the intent of the lyrics. There's some great lines here. In particular - Be the lightning in me/That strikes relentless
On to the next section: (ii) The Sunlight Through The Flags
The introduction to this reminds me of the piano pieces of composer John Adams, and also the compositions of Steve Reich. It's layered, cross-rhythmic, mesmerising stuff. More and more gets added to it , changing the rhythmic direction and emphasis. When it comes to the chorus, the introduction of a straight rhythm on distorted electric guitar is frankly disappointing. It detracts from the complexity of the rest of this section of the piece.
Finally, for the third section: (iii) Daylight
This a disappointing conclusion to an otherwise brilliant piece. The verses are boring slow and uninspired, but redemption comes from the chorus with a lot more movement and far less bleeding heart sappiness. Overall it's okay, but would be better as a standalone song rather than being bundled in with it's outstanding predecessors.

On the whole it's quite a complex album. There's some brilliant moments, offset with some downright emo whinginess. Best listened to on a cold cloudy day with at least two glasses of red wine in hand.