To learn to love Snow Patrol is to stop fighting against the tide

Snow Patrol are derided by critics and Gary Lightbody sounds like the world’s most miserable man. Yet his sincerity wil grip your heart

4/5
“Love is just pain in reverse,” sings Gary Lightbody, in the most tender moment of These Lies, a vulnerably moving highlight of Snow Patrol’s eighth album, The Forest is the Path.
Who would want to be Lightbody? The Northern Irishman is 48 years old, he’s been leading Snow Patrol for 30 years, from their origins in Dundee University through 10 years as Britpop also-rans before belatedly rising to multi-million selling stars with their emotional pop rock.
These days, he is rich, famous and feted, he collected an OBE from the late Queen at Windsor Castle in 2020 and has sung with Taylor Swift. Yet he still sounds like the most miserable rock star on the planet, perpetually overwhelmed by his own inadequacies and desperately clutching for signs of hope in a relentless sea of adversity.
“This is not a love song,” is the opening line of an album that has been six years in the works. Oh, but wait. By the time his slick ensemble have chugged through two verses of piano-led introspection before smoothly rising to a chorus of epic self-flagellation, Lightbody has an admission to make: “So I guess this is a love song after all.” Quelle surprise.
There is something very prosaic about Snow Patrol, which I think is why so few critics admire them, whilst the public has taken them to its singalong heart. Their songs tend to execute the same tricks, building on slow shifting chord progressions at a stately stadium plod, gradually adding elements (chugging guitars, spacious piano motifs and glistening keyboards) in an exercise of sustained tension and release. When the choruses finally come, they crash down like a tsunami. To learn to love Snow Patrol it helps to stop fighting against the tide and just let it carry you. Their best songs are infused with unadulterated emotion, a purity and joy of expression of deep feelings that is the envy of their contemporaries.
Snow Patrol are much in demand as pop collaborators, particularly keyboard player and guitarist Johnny McDaid who has worked with Ed Sheeran, Pink, Robbie Williams, BTS, Alicia Keys and many more (and enjoys a glamorous Hollywood profile via his 20-year relationship with Friends star Courteney Cox). Yet Lightbody is Snow Patrol’s not-so-secret weapon. His gift is total sincerity. A recovered alcoholic who has returned from Los Angeles to his native Bangor and who recently admitted he has not “been in a relationship in a long time,” he writes because he feels it, he sings because he means it.
The Forest is the Path sounds like Snow Patrol’s most lovelorn album (which is to say, very lovelorn indeed). On closer inspection there is more going on in these songs of fractured relationships. Lightbody’s father died in 2019, after a long period of dementia, and that loss burns at the centre of Years That Fall, This Is the Sound of Your Voice and Everything’s Here and Nothing’s Lost. If the song strategies seem predictable and the sentiments over familiar, the album as a whole still grips my heart and squeezes. I find myself wanting to listen to it again and again, and I can’t say that about every album I review.
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