A Hundred Million Suns, Snow Patrol's fifth studio album, ends with a 16-minute, three-part song called "The Lightning Strike." The idea is creative and the result is pleasing, but in terms of creativity and ambition, it comes too little and too late.
Suns' marks very little progress for Snow Patrol - the record's biggest problem. In fact, it feels more like a mere extension of the band's previous album, Eyes Open, than a separate and whole entity. The band has yet again decided to choose moody string-laden love ballads over the rockier sounds of the group's earlier works, and this time around, Snow Patrol's faster-paced songs don't have enough vigor to punctuate the album's gloomy setting.
This could be the sound of Snow Patrol attempting to recapture the success of the ever-popular "Chasing Cars," a song responsible for the band's peak in popularity. But while attempting to wind up more heart-throbbing masterpieces, Snow Patrol has allowed its newest effort to play out like a Grey's Anatomy soundtrack.
Collectively, the songs are written as one extremely vague love epic; they are filled with countless expressions of intimacy but they never reach any insight or definite point of view. It sounds like the band took different statements of longing from all the love-sick teenage bloggers in the world and strung them together.
For example, in the warped-sounding rock song "Engines," lead singer Gary Lightbody begins almost every line with the phrases: "You say you love me like the ... ," "I know I love you like the ... " or "I know you love me like the ... , " which is followed by some simile comparing love to a different cosmic object. Not only are these lyrics not inventive, but their repetition also gives the listener a sense there is little content to spread around - a sense gleaned from the album as a whole.
It's like butter spread over too much bread. When Lightbody runs out of words to sing, he repeats. Choruses and verses bleed into each other, electronics and strings build to a climax. Over and over again.
But when every song in an album is filled with a sort of crescendo effect, the album as a whole tends to forgo its own momentum. And without momentum, A Hundred Million Suns loses any sense of identity and becomes a forgettable endeavor.
Despite its setbacks, Suns isn't all bad. Lightbody has always been talented at writing tunes that stick from the first bar. Tracks such as "Crack the Shutters," "Take Back the City" and "Set Down Your Glass" are particularly catchy and contain at least enough content to keep listeners satisfied for a little while. Also, as mentioned before, much of the lengthy 16-minute finale works well and avoids the tedious mediocrity seen in the rest of the album.
In the middle of the empty spheres of A Hundred Million Suns, these songs just seem to fade into the background and become run-of-the-mill attempts. A Hundred Million Suns is not particularly bad, but the effect of very little substance combined with rambling repetition seems to only exhaust the listener.
Or, at the very least, provide the perfect soundtrack to a Thursday-night hospital drama.
2.5/5 Stars
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