Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 01/05/06
Label: Polydor

Snow Patrol aren't the first band to have revived an ailing career by slavishly mimicking Coldplay - stand up Athlete, Keane, Embrace - but along with Keane they are the most successful. Having spent most of their career putting out charming, ramshackle, under-selling indie records, they came back with the brazenly plagiaristic and interminably dull "Run", which somehow led to their last album "Final Straw" selling in its millions. Faced with following it up, band leader Gary Lightbody has taken a long hard look at mainstream fame and turned his back on it, delivering an album of such obstinate lo-fi grittiness it resembles PJ Harvey's "Rid Of Me" or Nirvana's "In Utero".

Just kidding! "Open Eyes" is in fact the sound of a man who has wandered into the middle of the road and decided to buy a house there. Sacking co-founder and bassist Mark McClelland was an early indicator of Lightbody's ambition, and "Open Eyes" is resounding proof, an album that couldn't have been crafted more cynically with stadiums in mind if it had called itself "Sponsored By Pepsi". But what's really surprising about this record isn't that it's not great but that, actually, behind the FM gloss and the tedious lyrical obsession with "relationship issues", "Open Eyes" is actually not at all bad.

So, yes, overproduced first single "You're All I Have" sounds suspiciously like Deacon Blue, but it also has beefy guitars and a gripping melody, while on the crunchy, gutsy "Hands Open", Lightbody proves he still has a knack for smart lyrics like "my tongue still misbehaves". But it's with slower material that his gift for tenderness truly comes through, such as on the stately lament and album highlight "Make This Go On Forever", where the gospel-inflected chorus seems to stagger under the weight of its own regret. Gospel also makes an appearance on "Shut Your Eyes", which may be sub-Chris Martin mysticism, but is soaked in a haze of shimmering, minor chord loveliness.

Inevitably, there are mis-steps. The glockenspiels that underpin "You Could Be Happy" are painfully twee, not charming. And on "Headlights On Dark Roads", Snow Patrol may dress themselves in Cure bass lines and Pixies guitars, but can't disguise the wet melody hiding underneath. Still, if there is nothing on here as seductive as "How To Be Dead", neither is there anything as atrocious and obvious as "Run", for which we should be thankful. As enjoyable as anything this calculated can be.

    by Jaime Gill