Final Straw : Snow Patrol : Review : Rolling Stone

Irish rockers get confessional and bombastic after a couple of underambitious and underwhelming indie albums, Ireland's Snow Patrol are reaching for the stars with Final Straw. It's already a huge hit in the U.K., propelled by its single, "Run," an enormous lighter-waving power ballad in the mold of Coldplay's "Yellow." Sensitive-boy frontman Gary Lightbody emotes about love objects both human and chemical as if sheer earnestness were the mark of a star, and when the band bears down and speeds up, it's got the bristling force of mid-Nineties college rock. But Final Straw's grand, intricately layered production covers up for how underdeveloped most of its songs are -- Lightbody sings so prettily that it takes a while to notice that his melodies go nowhere, and his straight-from-the-notebook lyrics ("I'm far too shy to speak to you at school," he croons on "Spitting Games") rarely add up to much.