| Product Summary | | Label: Universal Music Group | | UPC: 00602517852624 | | Release Date: 10/28/2008 | | Buy.com Sku: 209702594 | | Item#: M4FYN2 | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 2010 | Format:  CD |
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(P) 2008 Polydor Ltd. (UK) Under exclusive license to Geffen Records in the USA
(C) 2008 Polydor Ltd. (UK) Under exclusive license to Geffen Records in the USA
| "This is our most complete record by far. A Hundred Million Suns sounds like the marriage of everything we learned from the Jeepster years and the Fiction years made into something new and bolder. Our spikiness and our indie-ness are coming through again with all the poppiness of the last two records. There's a lot of melody here and you can't cloak that whatever you do with it. This album is touched by our entire history, and hopefully sounds like our future too." --Gary Lightbody
"...rife with the kind of midtempo rock ballads that dreamy rom-com climaxes are made of." Entertainment Weekly
"Irish Rockers still going for the emotional jugular on impressive fifth album." Hot Press
"...Lightbody has a moody streak and a beautifully expressive voice, which sounds exquisite on the band's newest record..." Paste Magazine
"...an engaging sidestep for a band that does triumphantly normal better than almost anyone." Spin
"A Hundred Million Suns might just be Snow Patrol's biggest, most genuine effort yet." The Onion A.V. Club
| | Album Notes and Credits |
Notes & Personnel Info |  | Lyricist: Gary Lightbody. | | Snow Patrol: Gary Lightbody, Nathan Connolly (vocals, guitar); Tom Simpson (keyboards); Paul Wilson (bass guitar); Jonny Quinn (drums). | | Personnel: Jacknife Lee (harmonica). | | Additional personnel: John Barclay, Pat White , Guy Barker, Mark Law (trumpet); Dan Jenkins, Colin Sheen (trombone); Ian Fasham, David Stewart (bass trombone); Stephen Wick, James Anderson (tuba); Evgeny Chebykin, Jocelyn Lightfoot, Kira Doherty, Richard Bayliss, Timothy Brown , Philip Eastop (horns). | | Audio Mixer: Cenzo Townshend. | | Audio Remasterer: John Davis. | | Arranger: Avshalom Caspi. | | Building on the success of 2006's EYES OPEN, A HUNDRED MILLION SUNS cements Snow Patrol's place as one of the premiere alternative pop-rock bands of the early 2000s. All the elements that made up the band's previous work--resonant-hooky melodies, crisp arrangements, and a searching, expansive indie rock feel--are refined and elevated on this 2008 release. In addition to strong songwriting and carefully balanced sonic elements, A HUNDRED MILLION SUNS plays to Snow Patrol's ability to balance commercially minded pop with an indie rock ethos, as ballads like "Crack the Shutters" and the lush, groove-driven "The Golden Floor" prove. Polished and well crafted from beginning to end, the band's fifth full-length is arguably their strongest, and puts them in the running for indie pop-rock stardom. | | If Final Straw introduced Snow Patrol to the mainstream and Eyes Open cemented the band's popularity, then A Hundred Million Suns is the group's ultimate bid for stardom, its slick production and sonic uplift designed to catapult Snow Patrol into the upper echelons of modern music. Like "Chasing Cars," the mega-single from Snow Patrol's previous album, tracks like "Take Back the City" and "If There's a Rocket Tie Me to It" are slyly repetitive -- their hooks are cyclic, each comprising only a handful of notes, and their straightforward familiarity helps maximize the songs' singalong potential. But A Hundred Million Suns also features more curve balls than the band's past catalog, from "Lifeboats" (an icy love song with synthesizer glissandos and falsetto harmonies) to "The Golden Floor," whose handclap-and-stomp intro recalls the light hip-hop flavor of OneRepublic's "Apologize." This is where Snow Patrol sound best -- at the intersection between marketable pop/rock and something more challenging, whether it's an unexpected arrangement or an interesting melodic turn. The band's appeal also owes a good deal to Gary Lightbody, who maintains his status as the least famous frontman of a very famous band. He's the boy next door, a musical Everyman who's just as average looking as Chris Martin and only half as desperately self-effacing. Looks may have little to do with an artist's music, but such appearances help ground Snow Patrol's music, even while "Take Back the City" and "Please Take These Photos from My Hands" reach for the same stars that U2 routinely grab. When A Hundred Million Suns focuses on music -- not saccharine radio fodder like "Chasing Cars," but actual music, with twists and turns that haven't been mapped out by generations of likeminded balladeers -- 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. ~ Andrew Leahey |
Producer: Jacknife Lee |
Engineer: Tom McFall; Phil Rose; Karen Kelleher; Owen Lewis; Sam Bell |
| Entertainment Reviews
 | Snow Patrol - A Hundred Million Suns - CD Review By: Dusty Somers - Blogcritics.org Reviews Published on: 10/30/2008 8:20 AM | | After years of laboring in obscurity, they’ve settled in comfortably to a familiar formula – expansive, heavily layered rockers mingling with hushed, intimate ballads. A Hundred Million Suns lives up to the rest of the material in the Snow Patrol canon – it’s neither standout nor stinker, but for the crowd that listens to Snow Patrol, it’s perfect. ...read the full review |
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| | Technical Info | | Release Date : 10/28/2008 | | Original Release Date : 2008 | | Catalog ID : B001215602 | | Label : A&M Records (USA) | | Number of Discs : 1 | | Studio/Live : Studio | | Mono/Stereo : Stereo | | SPAR Code : n/a | | UPC : 00602517852624 |
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| | Professional Reviews | | Rolling Stone (p.126)
- 3 stars out of 5 -- "Snow Patrol are all about big: echoing soundscapes; gargantuan guitar crescendos -- emotions that can be described only in terms of mythology and astronomy."Spin (p.100)
- 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "Snow Patrol doesn't seem as beholden to big hooks on album five, but they still keep things likably grand." Entertainment Weekly (p.61)
- "[T]he bulk of the album belongs to shivery numbers like 'If There's a Rocket Tie Me to It,' 'Lifeboats,' and 'The Golden Floor' -- heartswellers, all." -- Grade: B PopMatters 9 of 10
If there's a "Chasing Cars" moment on this album, it's "The Planets Bend Between Us". Though unquestionably softer and less tense, "Planets" manufactures many metric tons more pathos than that song about lying down...To parse the tableau beyond its obvious romantic yearning, it could also be a naked appeal to the American audience that embraced Lightbody as a sensitive, fuzzy Brit boyfriend but has seemed less amenable to his (more interesting) rock star leanings than his home market has. Either way, it's just earnest enough to be entirely irresistible...For a record that Lightbody has claimed would be more cheerful than previous efforts, A Hundred Million Suns' tones are less dulcet and more doubtful. Perhaps doubt is hopeful in and of itself after the certainty of heartache that permeated Eyes Open, but even the minutely-detailed pain of the previous LP was redeemed with spectacular enlightenment in the grand climax of "Open Your Eyes". There is nothing of a similarly comforting transcendent sweep lying in wait in the final minutes of A Hundred Million Suns. Instead, there's "The Lightning Strike", a 16-minute, three-movement celestial metaphor of operatic grandeur and overwhelming beauty. Linked together by alike synthesizer bedrocks of gradually increasing warmth and brightness, the song-cycle progresses from silver-lined dark clouds to hints of dawn before finally settling on a lovely, sun-drenched morning...Whether or not this album contains a hit as massive as "Chasing Cars", it's a confident, balanced work of mass art with only extremely minor flaws. A record built for dusks and dawns in wide open spaces, wherever they may be found. - Ross Langager
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| | Bio | | | Snow Patrol The main thing to get about Snow Patrol is that, 14 years after they started out as a student band at Dundee University, they're still flying, gloriously and unpredictably, by the seat of their pants. "The great and terrifying thing about our band," declares their leader and main songwriter Gary Lightbody, "Is that everything has always happened as it's going along. There's been very little masterplan. We allow things to happen as much by accident as by deliberate intention." One notable early accident was their name. Lightbody's band used to be known as Polar Bear - hence their 1998 debut album Songs for Polarbears - but were obliged to change it after discovering that this was what the bassist of Jane's Addiction was calling his side project. 'Snow Patrol' had already been chosen for them by a friend who didn't care for the Polar Bear moniker; and so it came to pass that Snow Patrol signed in 1995 to the Jeepster label, home of their Glaswegian indie heroes at the time, Belle and Sebastian. Now that the band have become feted as commercial giants - their last album Eyes Open was the UK's best-seller of 2006, it's worth remembering that Snow Patrol spent the 1990's so broke that at one low point Lightbody had to sell his record collection to pay the rent. Jeepster finally dropped them in 2001 after their second album, the presciently titled When it's All Over We Still Have to Clear Up, failed to connect beyond their passionate but stubbornly tiny fanbase. "We spent 10 years making records that 6000 people bought," Lightbody confirms. "Success to us isn't a chart thing, it's when you turn up to play a gig and find the place is full." In the early days, their largest audiences were back in Ireland, the country where Bangor-born Lightbody grew up before moving to Scotland as a student. "We're very lucky in that we seem to have three home town audiences in Belfast, Dublin and Glasgow, although we get an extraordinary reception whenever we play anywhere in Ireland or Scotland."
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