Snow Patrol: A Hundred Million Suns : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Snow Patrol are all about big: echoing soundscapes; gargantuan guitar crescendos — emotions that can be described only in terms of mythology and astronomy. On the Irish rockers' latest, fresh off 2006's worldwide smash Eyes Open, frontman Gary Lightbody's lyrics keep returning to space-travel metaphors. One dreamy song is titled "The Planets Bend Between Us (For You)," another, "If There's a Rocket Tie Me to It." In "Engines," Lightbody coos, "Use me forever as rocket fuel... Love me like the silence of the turning earth." But Lightbody has an agile tenor, and the band distinguishes itself from the post-Coldplay pack with a flair for arrangements that almost justifies the grandiosity of 16-minute epics like "The Lightning Strike," in which Lightbody sings about — what else? — "the planet's last dance."