A Hundred Million Suns

Snow Patrol handily manages the challenge of following up breakthrough album "Eyes Open" on A Hundred Million Suns.

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.

A Hundred Million Suns is rife with the kind of midtempo rock ballads that dreamy rom-com climaxes are made of.

Irish Rockers still going for the emotional jugular on impressive fifth album.

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.'

A Hundred Million Suns sounds like a holding pattern for Snow Patrol. [Nov 2008, p.104]

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.

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.

A Hundred Million Suns? Ugh. More like a hundred million yawns.

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.

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.

It’s a confident, balanced work of mass art with only extremely minor flaws.

A 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]

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.

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."

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.

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.

A Hundred Million Suns might just be Snow Patrol's biggest, most genuine effort yet.

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.'

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.