Concert Reports

Hot off the heels of Snow Patrol's new album, Fallen Empires, the band played the Santa Barbara Bowl on Saturday, October 20th

 All Photos: Eric Isaacs www.emiPhoto.com 

www.SnowPatrol.com           www.SbBowl.com

Very Special Thanks: Jesse Lee Weiss

The Irish/Scottish five-piece have sold over 11 million albums and have been responsible for several era-defining singles, including Run, Chocolate, and Chasing Cars (which spent an incredible 104 weeks in the UK Top 75 and was voted song of the decade in a Channel 4 poll). Their albums have been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, Grammys and MTV Europe Music Awards, with Final Straw landing them an Ivor Novello Award in 2005. By anyone's standards, it's been a pretty good century so far.  

Snow Patrol's new album, Fallen Empires, arrives with a serious reputation attached. Over several months, singer Gary Lightbody, guitarist Nathan Connolly, bassist Paul Wilson, drummer Jonny Quinn and keyboardist, Tom Simpson began a musical road trip around California. Along the way, R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, US singer Lissie and Queens Of The Stone Age guitarist, Troy Van Leeuwen all popped by to lend a guitar part here, a lyric idea there. Meanwhile, Snow Patrol's new adventures seeped into every note on Fallen Empires. The result is an album that promises to redefine the band as an altogether more ambitious, more expansive, creative force.

On first listen, its immediately apparent that Fallen Empires breaks new ground for the band. Bolting distorted, electro guitar riffs, club-friendly drums and anthemic choruses to Gary Lightbody's heart-bruised lyricism, this is an album that takes its cues from LCD Soundsystem's The Sound Of Silver, U2's Achtung Baby and The Suburbs, Arcade Fire's aforementioned album. Despite the experimentation, Fallen Empires still retains the essence of Snow Patrol’s appeal. The catch-all emotional dynamics are still there: the soulful New York feels like a festival moment-in-waiting; The Garden Rules a soundtrack to autumnal romance.  

The overall results are an album that should mark Snow Patrol as a band big on experimental ideas as well as stadium sized anthems. Fallen Empires feels like a suitably weighty follow-up to the platinum success of 2008's A Hundred Millions Suns and the million-selling 2009 collection Up To Now - it is simply their best record to date.  

www.SnowPatrol.com        www.SbBowl.com  

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