Contrary to popular belief, not all music journalists get off on being snide about the same old easy-to-slate bands. When something like this album arrives in my review schedule, my instinct is to seek the good, to stick two fingers up to my sneering peers. Unfortunately Snow Patrol’s new album is proving a challenge. I am struggling to find the positives.
But let’s try. By now, you will know the drill with Snow Patrol. Kind of early Coldplay but lathered in (even more) overwrought emotion and lighters-in-the-air effusiveness. Their songs “Run” and “Chasing Cars” are staples of stadium sensitivity-signalling. The band, now a three-piece, recently said goodbye to drummer Jonny Quinn, their longest serving member aside from singer-frontman Gary Lightbody. Not that it’s made much odds.
Enough biog. Back to the positives. “Years That Fall” comes on like a cross between Unforgettable Fire-era U2 and The Police. Perversely, in this context that’s a compliment. And that’s it. The other 11 songs are mostly piano-led ballads, sometimes with gradually rising, plod-drumming, usually blossoming into enormous bombast during their latter half, all topped by Lightbody’s falsetto voice-breaking vocals.
It’s almost all pleadingly about love (“All we are is an aching/That can barely be filled/But if you can just hold me for a moment/I’d be thrilled”, etc). There is a certain wit to “These Lies”, which begins with a promise not to lie anymore… after these final lies, which prove to be, “I never really loved you at all”. And so on. Get it?
The truth is, though, that it’s hard work reaching the end of The Forest is the Path. It seems to go on and on and on (although it’s not especially long). Its music alchemises romance into a sludgy sonic glutinousness. Lovelorn melancholy is rendered a weepy soup of actorly tears to drown in, en masse, in gigantic arenas.
No thanks. As Charli XCX so aptly put it in 2022, “Yuck, lookin' at me all sucky/Yuck, quit acting like a puppy.”
Below: Watch the lyric video for "The Beginning" by Snow Patrol
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