Snow Patrol

Snow Patrol are very good at what they do. Since the success of breakthrough singles "Run" and "Chasing Cars," they haven't strayed very far from the formula that worked for them, and that generally holds true for A Hundred Million Suns. It's exactly what you'd expect from a band in their position and it delivers on everything they've promised. The sheer lack of ambition is the only potential obstacle they face in their quest for world domination, as there are too many times where they appear to be phoning it in. It's only at the very end with "The Lightning Strike," a three-part, 16-minute epic, that they suggest they want to stretch their limits, although the grand gesture threatens to collapse under its own sense of importance. When they stick to providing the perfect song of longing for the pivotal scene in a very-special-episode of Gray's Anatomy, however, they are at their most comfortable, so perhaps they should just stick to what they know best.