Hit after hit. It’s like sitting at a Tragically Hip show where you start to realize that you’ve heard almost every song they throw at you… before. How had they gotten to you? On the radio? Adverts? The tele? The alternative rock group Snow Patrol knows how to pump songs out, and Gary Lightbody is the Starfighter Pilot of lyrics – this time writing about being in love, in a functional normal relationship… Not falling madly in love, not falling out of love, not suffering from a dysfunctional wretched love or mourning a lost tragic love. Not the kind of love where you cut the LVAD wire anyway. The Glasgow-based band’s fifth studio album A Hundred Million Suns strays from the modus operandi of Eyes Open. It’s not hard to see that when Lightbody warbles to his fans, he can’t help but flash frequent slap-happy grins. And it’s amply contagious; the room breaks out in a swelling chorus with each smile. Snowflakes spiralling, he asks the crowd to shine, from ear-to-ear parading their teeth and to sing so loud that they “shatter (his) eyeballs.” So they gladly play ‘follow the leader’ with a roar. “Shut your eyes and sing to me… SHUT YOUR EYES AND SING TO ME!” At the encore set, the planets aligned with a backdrop vortex of heaved origami drawn stars, and it almost felt just as he said, “This is the safest place you’ve found.” We were light-years away from havoc and pain and numbed by a happy trance. As much as this tour was about promoting A Hundred Million Suns, it seemed the crowd cafeteria-clamored the most for all of the Eyes Open tracks. And that’s okay because Lightbody and his polar bear band mates are taking back the cities for themselves, steadily and slowly this time around.
related
- Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody Helms New Supergroup
- Snow Patrol – Last Night @ Metropolis
- The Whigs – In The Dark
