2008 is a year in which those three bands often seen by some almost like a kind of unholy triumvirate - Coldplay, Keane, and Snow Patrol - are releasing new albums. Personally, I think they're often unfairly maligned. I've often thought that rather than demonising alternative rock bands which attain big chart success and widespread popularity, surely we should applaud them for at least introducing a bit of today's alternative music into the mainstream? Would we prefer it if manufactured pop was always top of the charts?Besides which, it's not as though they haven't each released some decent music. Whilst Snow Patrol's last album, 2006's Eyes Open, was a bit of a curate's egg, 2004's Final Straw was pretty damn good for the most part. Those two albums, though, can both be justly criticised for their focus on frontman Gary Lightbody's relationship crises. The slightly pompously-titled A Hundred Million Suns is clearly a considered reaction to the gloomy and slightly angsty tone of the previous two records, instead making an attempt to focus on relationships going well rather than badly. That said, Snow Patrol were always a more musically aggressive band than their aforementioned peers, and in parts, this new album continues to develop that. Whilst on the one hand there are more acoustic guitars and keyboards than before, there are also more searing guitars on some tracks - but like Coldplay's Viva La Vida, this album is about making small alterations rather than making grand statements of re-invention. It doesn't sound like Boney M, Katy Perry or Pantera. It sounds like Snow Patrol.Broadly speaking, the more conventional Patrols are in the first half of the album, and the slightly more "experimental" (I use the word cautiously) ones are in the second half. That first half is characterised by the single "Take Back The City", which showcases those more searing guitars I mentioned, and "Crack The Shutters", which unfortunately shows that in attempting to move away from broken relationship-based lyrics, Lightbody has a tendency to come up with irritatingly saccharine and fuzzy-wuzzy lyrics instead. Still, the way it rides up little musical slopes topped with pretty glockenspiels is quite charming.By contrast, "Engines", from the second half, has Lightbody's vocals bathed in odd processing and distortion most of the time, and there are a few curious flourishes of chopped-up sound and fuzzy guitar-noise all over the shop. "The Planets Bend Between Us" adds a few spacey lyrics to the standardised template, resulting in the origin of the album's titles. By far and away the most striking musical departure on the whole album, though, is the last track. "The Lightning Strike" is a sixteen-minute piece in three movements, making it massively more ambitious than anything else the band has attempted before. The first part - "What If The Storm Ends?" is the best, with a slow buildup leading into dramatic, stagey arrangements around "the planet's last dance". The juxtaposition of this epic with the rest of the album reminds me a little bit of late-era Genesis, where "That's All" had to sit a bit awkwardly next to the immense "Home by the Sea / Second Home by the Sea", for example. At least Snow Patrol are sensible to put this monster of a track at the end, and it provides a stirring and surprisingly daring conclusion to A Hundred Million Suns. After all, that title doesn't seem so pompous...Neither a triumph nor a failure by any means, Snow Patrol's fifth album cements their position as a (usually) radio-friendly staple of the musical architecture. Better than the ultimately patchy Eyes Open but not yet approaching the laid-back cool of Final Straw, this isn't likely to make a lot of headlines, positively or negatively. But it'll shift shedloads of copies, and it'll get a lot of plays. But when there's actually quite a lot to like here, from the bombast of opener "If There's A Rocket Tie Me To It" to that slightly crackers ending epic, why the hell not? 74%