Snow Patrol - Signal Fire

Did you know that Snow Patrol’s ‘Eyes Open’ album has sold nearly 4 million copies worldwide? Not bad for the slightly tuneless indie kids I saw touring their first album sometime in 1999. Still, fingers have well and truly been pulled out, and, thanks initially in no small part to the success of Coldplay, their slightly curious world domination continues unabated. The addition of American acceptance to their UK radio and chart success has resulted in ‘Signal Fire’ being one of the lead songs from the Spiderman 3 soundtrack, giving it even more exposure than was already guaranteed by the unstoppable cogs of their corporate machine.

Musically, they continue to tread familiar ground (Martha Wainwright collaborations aside) and ‘Signal Fire’ is a typically U2 aping, slow burning anthem in the vein of their two biggest hits to date ‘Run’ and ‘Chasing Cars’. It would be easy to dismiss this song as watered down chart rubbish, but it is actually not that bad a song. Despite the typically maudlin verse and different sections of the song sounding a little fractured, the guitar that builds, almost post-rock style into the anthemic chorus actually really works. Lyrically it is run-of-the-mill troubled love song stuff (“There you are just standing right in front of me, All this fear falls away and you leave me naked, Hold me close ‘cos I need you to lead me to safety”) but careers have been made and sustained with worse (stand up, Chris Martin).

Terrible song it is not, but what it definitely is – from Gary Lightbody’s unmistakable Irish twang through to the typically neutral universality of the title – is a Snow Patrol song. Without wanting to be presumptuous, I am guessing that this very fact will mean that not many people reading this review will take any interest in it, listen to it or give it much of a chance. And that is how it should be – there is a hell of a lot of more interesting, innovative, committed and, well, considerably better music being made right now. But as far as chart-dominating sugar-coated indie-rock that must exist in this modern music industry, there is a lot worse around than this.

For ‘Signal Fire’ is a perfectly acceptable and inoffensive slice of mainstream rock. In the genre of big, morose, yearning anthems (depending on your taste: for “morose” read miserable, for “yearning” read whining and for “big” read overproduced) Snow Patrol have got it pretty much bang on and have proven that they have more up their sleeve than pretenders like Athlete. Whether you are interested in this kind of music or not, or whether I give it one star or five, doesn’t really matter. It will be rammed down the throat of the mainstream radio listener and will sell copies by the bucket-load. The fact of the matter is, there will always be music like Snow Patrol and this certainly isn’t the worst they could do.

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First published on rockfeedback.com. See it here.