Photo courtesy of Waytoa Shing.
This lady I barely see around Austin anymore turned me on to these guys five years ago when she gave me a spare copy of Final Straw which led me to stumbling upon their cover of Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love;” they do it way better using their guitars in place of the cliche horns section. When their bigger album Eyes Open hit the scene in 2006, I was definitely hooked yet I missed the opportunity to see them at Stubb’s around 2006 or 2007 because of other priorities.
Last night I finally had the opportunity to see this (Northern) Irish-Scottish perform tracks from their current album, the rather excellent A Hundred Million Suns; it was released almost a year ago and I have yet to hear the big track “Take Back the City” on standard radio yet. I think, outside of my stream/iPod, I’ve heard it more often through my Rock Band game since it was an awesome download to score.
So as a live act, they were great! I am kicking myself for not bothering to catch them sooner to witness earlier material such as the song “Spitting Games,” “It’s Beginning to Get to me,” and “Please Take These Photos from my Hands.” Snow Patrol isn’t as depressing as those titles sound. They did do “Take Back the City,” “Hands Open,” and “How to be Dead” amongst things mainly from the current record. Other cool highlights were the lead singer Gary Lightbody making funny comments about the humidity which I figure he isn’t accustomed to in the band’s current home of Scotland. The best one was his apology if his hair deteriorated from sweating and he began to resemble, quote “Weird Al Yankovich (sic).” Meanwhile, they had a projection system casting on the canopy at Stubb’s to greet the audience during their opening number; It listed all the cities on their ongoing tour and how they all felt like home. Then they gave a personal howdy to Austin as the picture above shows.
Again, I’m glad I saw them in action. All during the Snow Leopard beta testing I did at work, I used a picture Snow Patrol as the Desktop on one of the test clients I was using to help me remember when it was booted in Snow Leopard aka 10.6 (the other two had Def Leppard and the Doves because they’re from Snowden). These guys are now on my short list of acts to repeat seeing whenever they come back through Austin.
Opening for Snow Patrol was Plain White T’s who were also finishing out a tour on a record they released last year. They did perform “Boomerang” which they will be laying down in the studio when they get started on their next album. Despite how sick I am of “Delilah,” I like everything else this Chicago quintet does namely “Hate (I Really Don’t Like You),” “Big Bad World” and “That Girl.” No luck on their best song ever, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Dial Drunk.”