Counting Snow

(or, Crow Patrol...I guess)

Snow Patrol is the anti-Counting Crows. It's true. There's no denying it. And they are both adequate and inadequate at the same time, just in opposite ways. Let me explain....

Counting Crows' Adam Duritz is an excellent songwriter by nearly all accounts: he is original, facile, and deep without ever being emo (though he gets country-whiney sometimes, but it tends to fit). The Crows' production doesn't add more to the music than needed, and the song remains about the song writing, which, again, is ace.

Meanwhile, Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody is a sort of off-white kind of guy. It'd be hard to tell if "A Hundred Million Suns" was made before or after "Eyes Open" because both albums sound like they sprang from the dirt beneath the cheerless remains of Frosty the Snowman's half-melted midsection. Concisely put, Lightbody writes the same song over and over again and makes good money doing it. But listening to Snow Patrol is like sitting on a bean bag on the train while everyone else has to sit upright on badly designed plastic seats. It's so easy. The substance is handed to you on a cocktail platter and you don't have to listen, just enjoy. With Duritz, you can praise the lyrics, the guitar interplay, the clever arrangement, but only if you so choose. So naturally do the sounds caress the crannies of your brain.

Both bands make for effortless listening, but while Duritz does it with effortless song writing, Lightbody does it without effort.

And to address how Counting Crows is inadequate in that way, no one says music should be listened to effortlessly anyway. That's why no one listens to the Easy Listening station except worn out, menopausal women. Like Celine Dion. Haw haw haw.