Snow Patrol live

Scottish softies turn snow to slush.

They made the biggest-selling album in Britain this year, but Snow Patrol are as joyless live as on record. Maybe it's time they took a holiday in Mali ...

Kitty Empire

The Observer

Snow Patrol G-Mex, Manchester

Snow Patrol singer Gary Lightbody staggers around the stage, eyes screwed shut. Scotland's most eligible bachelor (source: Scotland on Sunday) shakes and gangles and spasms, all musicianly joy. Backlit, his enormous shadow falls on the lovely Victorian walls and graceful arched ceiling of this former railway shed in the centre of Manchester. The song is 'It's Beginning to Get to Me', from Snow Patrol's fourth album, Eyes Open

But the moves are at odds with the tunes. Lightbody's strutting and fretting suggests he's at the helm of some bucking Viking ship of rock. He is, in fact, in charge of a giant train set of a song, one that goes round and round and round on one riff, and which, depending on the brand of battery used, could go on indefinitely. It's the kind of song whose calculated tension really doesn't warrant split trousers and auto-erotic rock whiplash.

Snow Patrol have many songs like this, that build and build and build to something slightly damp with regret. They have carefully constructed a very successful latterday career on them. 'Run' the breakout hit from their pivotal album, 2003's Final Straw (received ecstatically tonight) set the template.

'Chasing Cars', the gateway single from Eyes Open - a song recently nominated for a Grammy, thanks in part to TV airplay on Grey's Anatomy in the States - does it too. Some of these songs get to a climax. Some of them - like sing-song ballad 'How to be Dead' - craftily withdraw, just before the moment of rock jouissance. The trick, once spotted, is hard to ignore. Over the course of a long gig the cumulative effect is of a giant disembodied hand, drumming its fingers, wiping a tear now and again.

Wow, can tension be dull. Snow Patrol's concatenation of rueful builds is relieved, if that's the right word, by a smattering of songs from the vaults. The first is 'Starfighter Pilot' the band's first single, from nearly a decade ago. They were called Polar Bear then, and sounded, at times, like a baggy version of Sonic Youth. They were signed to Jeepster, home of Belle & Sebastian, and they were very, very indie.

How times change. Now they are supersized, indie gone grand. Let's call it 'grandie'. In late November Eyes Open overtook Arctic Monkeys and became the biggest-selling album of 2006 in the UK. Phew: for a while there it was looking like a great record brimming with wit, vigour and originality might actually scoop the top sales prize.

Thankfully, good sense has prevailed. Britain can pat itself on the back, having embraced an album with all the texture and edge of a security blanket doused with fabric softener. The commercial honours of the last few years - Blunt, Keane, Dido, even the distinctly classier Coldplay - tell a sorry tale. We see bands as things with which to wipe our tears, where once they were, properly, rabble-rousers, Pied Pipers and volatile party kindling.

That said, it is hard to actually hate Snow Patrol. That's because it is hard to summon up any strong feelings at all about a band cast, tonight, in heroic dimensions by small player-cams that project their antics on to a jigsaw of screens behind the stage. They are affable Northern Irish and Scottish guys, who put in many years in the rock mines. You'd rather be stuck in a lift with them than Kasabian. Lightbody says dutifully rude things about George Bush. The singer's side project, the Reindeer Section, provided work for many a musician down on their luck. A Section song is reprised tonight, with guests Iain Archer on guitar and Declan O'Rourke on trumpet. And Snow Patrol have one claim to genuine greatness, current single 'Set the Fire to the Third Bar', the tension of which bears fruit: actual goosebumps. Martha Wainwright's ghostly vocal is taken by Miriam Kaufmann tonight, but the song's enchantment is intact.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006