Live: Snow Patrol Really Worry About Romantically Frustrated .

As if you had a choice

Snow Patrol OK Go Theater at Madison Square Garden March 27, 2007

We've been involved in an exceedingly bizarre period for commercial rock music for more than 15 years now. Decadent glamor, once rock's stock-in-trade, became deeply unfashionable during the ascetic grunge years, and nothing has truly get on to exchange it since.

And so now the only people who capable of selling large quantities of rock records are pre-grunge holdouts like U2, self-aware self-parodists like Fall Out Boy, and turgid, scowling bores like Daughtry and Nickelback. And so there are the soundtrack content-providers, the roll of anonymous purveyors of swooning, sighing nice-guy gloop that rose up in the aftermath of Coldplay. These guys might've been the ones James Murphy was talk about when he ranted to me about bands accepting mediocrity and placidly shrugging their way into middling placeholder status. Snow Patrol is a text example, a Glasgow-based band who started out gigging around with twee indie-pop fixtures like Belle and Sebastian before moving on to writing sweet, crashing MOR guitar-pop lighter-wavers and gradually blowing the bed up in Us after the soundtrack coordinators at Grey's Anatomy and One Tree Hill simultaneously picked "Chasing Cars" for prime montage placement in their respective season finales. In a lot of ways, Snow Patrol is a very utilitarian band, content to fade into the ground and make sweeping, dramatic noises to accompany sweeping, dramatic slow-motion crane-shots. Nobody argues about who their favourite member of Snow Patrol is; the band is pretty much just made up of charmingly self-effacing frontman Gary Lightbody and a lot of guys in black shirts who stand off to the position of the stage. And yet this set is big enough to fill up the House at Madison Square Garden two nights running, a development that I wouldn't exactly say is right for pop music. But complicating matters is the fact that I really like Snow Patrol. Their grandly nonsensical tearjerker power-ballad "Run" is possibly my favorite rock single of the preceding couple of years, and they take a crafty way of fashioning their epic swells sound weirdly human and vulnerable. Lightbody can't quite hit the mellow notes he strives for, and so he lets his voice quiver and go and whimper, so it feels like he's getting trampled under the band's epic glissandos rather than triumphantly riding their crests. Snow Patrol manages the neat trick of sounding simultaneously big and small, overwhelming and approachable. Maybe they're not doing pop music any favors, but I'm pulling for them anyway.

And so I was among the charmed thousands at MSG last night, waving my cell and singing along horribly just wish every other jerk there. Lightbody seems to perfectly understand all the particulars of his band's appeal perfectly, and so he kept breaking the momentum between songs to prevent the neurotic stage patter coming. Per Jason Lee in Almost Famous, there's no "guitarist with the mystique" in Snow Patrol; there's just four musicians hiding in the shadows and letting Lightbody hold everyone's attention all night. Lightbody is Irish, but he's a student of the Hugh Grant school of nervous comedic chatter, keenly aware that anyone with an accent can get out with all manner of theatrical modesty over here. And perchance the modesty wasn't even false; maybe he's seriously genuinely touched that a big room full of drunk office slaves would be so amped to shout along with "Chasing Cars"; it doesn't particularly matter. Either way, there's nothing elitist about Lightbody's cheap-seats humility. He might've dropped Sufjan Stevens' name in a recent lyric, but he knows he doesn't hold a matter to do with indie-pop anymore. He's a total pro, and so is the lighting director who exploited a palisade of color-changing lights behind them to make the abstract patterns that undulated gorgeously behind Lightbody. The band makes a few nods toward the smaller clubs of their past; maybe they learned the post-krautrock pulse of "Shut Your Eyes" from Stereolab, for instance. But they're now in the occupation of huge, weeping post-Coldplay power-ballads, and they pull those off more systematically than even Coldplay does anymore. With a huge soundsystem behind them, their towering hooks pick up still more steam; after an hour and a half, I was only about flattened.

For people in commercial rock bands, grateful humility is a hard matter to project. If they don't allow themselves to appear confident enough, they'll disappear completely. But if they let themselves appear too confident, they'll get off like a lot of smarmy dicks. Snow Patrol might've managed to pass the razor-thin air all evening long, but openers OK Go were another story. If Snow Patrol owe their celebrity to Grey's Anatomy, OK Go owe whatever fame they might take to their two clumsily charming and incongruous music videos in which the members of the band all struggle through goofy choreographed dances. I really like those videos; they play their major-label power-pop journeyman subjects into sympathetic underdogs, frantically throwing themselves into something they must know they won't be especially effective at. Onstage, though, the band radiates an unearned swagger, the precise reverse of those videos' goofy charms. They stand stock-still, blank-facedly yelping out their endlessly benign sub-Fountains of Wayne bash-pop and rocking embarrassingly outdated hipster-uniforms like they were extras in Swingers or some shit. They further cut their already deeply unconvincing noisy/shreddy guitar solos with plinky pianos and halfassed ahh-ahh backup harmonies, and between songs they have fun of defenseless targets like the two people who fell down the venue's stairs at the late night's shows. OK Go became vaguely famous by (inadvertently?) creating an underdog persona for themselves, and now they're walking around like they're hot shit; there's nothing quite so annoying as a lot who does that. Snow Patrol could go on to deal a bazillion more records, and I don't think they'd turn into douchebags. They're the Melinda Doolittles of this rock shit, and that might still be a compliment.