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A Hundred Million Suns might just be Snow Patrol's biggest, most genuine effort yet.
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It’s a confident, balanced work of mass art with only extremely minor flaws.
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A Hundred Million Suns is rife with the kind of midtempo rock ballads that dreamy rom-com climaxes are made of.
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Snow Patrol handily manages the challenge of following up breakthrough album "Eyes Open" on A Hundred Million Suns.
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The album wholly warrants Snow Patrol's fame, presenting a band that aspires to pop/rock grandeur without developing the accompanying ego. As a result, this is the group's best work yet.
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Singer Gary Lightbody has a moody streak and a beautifully expressive voice, which sounds exquisite on the band’s newest record, A Hundred Million Suns.
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the opening tracks, 'If There’s a Rocket Tie Me to It' and 'Crack the Shutters,' seem deliberately placed as reassuring entry points for those fans who connected in a big way with the heart-on-sleeve emotionalism of 2006’s hit 'Chasing Cars.'
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Irish Rockers still going for the emotional jugular on impressive fifth album.
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It's not a radical departure--there's no 'Kid A' in their future--but rather an engaging sidestep for a band that does triumphantly normal better than almost anyone.
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Three-part 16-minute closer 'The Lightening Strike,' at the other end of the scale, also sees them finally growing into their stadium skin, evoking Oasis, REM, Muse and, indeed, Coldplay amongst other subtleties and convincing you for once that they genuinely harbour ambition.
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However the finished album sees the band reverting to base instincts with the chug-paced, heart-tweaking, stadium-size choruses of 'Take Back the City' and 'Lifeboats.' Unit-shifting, radio-clogging business taken care of, they allow themselves freer rein with the urgent, almost hardcore-fast and uncomfortably confessional 'Disaster Button.'
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A Hundred Million Suns, aims to recapture the success of 'Chasing Cars' and finds the Scottish quintet continuing to hone the sound they introduced on 2003's "Final Straw."
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Really, though, the whole--say, the bracing rock of 'Take Back The City'--is more than the sum of these parts, and underlines this album as a success in its field.
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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.
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Q MagazineA Hundred Million Suns is just what their hordes demanded, similar enough to uits predecessors to be identifiably Snow Patrol but sufficently different to suggest progression. [Nov 2008, p.106]
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A Hundred Million Suns isn't a bad album - in fact, in parts, it's rather good. It's just that to find those good parts, you have to wade through acres of very average filler.
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There is just about enough top quality pop music on offer to ensure Snow Patrol’s star continues to grow on the world stage but, worryingly, A Hundred Million Suns is another middling affair from a by-now-mature pop act, and now might be the time to ask why.
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A Hundred Million Suns is rife with the sense of a band striving to be taken more seriously, whether through rocking more manfully, displaying a more sophisticated subtlety, or simply stringing together three ponderous, already-overlong songs and calling the impenetrable result a 16-minute stand-alone epic.
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It’s all so methodically planned that even standout radio-wave surfer ‘Take Back The City’ and producer Jacknife Lee struggle to stamp fresh life into this mega-selling formula.
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MojoA Hundred Million Suns sounds like a holding pattern for Snow Patrol. [Nov 2008, p.104]
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Under The RadarUltimately, Snow Patrol offers more bark than bite here. [Winter 2008]
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A Hundred Million Suns? Ugh. More like a hundred million yawns.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 28 out of 37
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Mixed: 5 out of 37
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Negative: 4 out of 37
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Jun 25, 2015
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Jun 17, 2011
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JackL.Oct 29, 2008A definite change for snow patrol, but a good one nonetheless.