At the band’s peak, Snow Patrol albums were designed like Autobot Blaster: Even with U2 and R.E.M. More than Lightbody’s lack of cogency, the imperious tone burdens Wildness. It’s bizarre to hear the same guy who’s begging for simplicity go on to compose an album whose lyric sheet can barely go one verse without herniating wordplay: “Now slip the tattoo on/Serenity it scorns your every mood,” he insists on “Wild Horses.” “Empress” has us “standing in the steady throne of restless hope.” On “A Youth Written in Fire,” he’s urging us to “Remember the first time we got high/We felt like the rabid lion’s roar.” Do any of these make sense, even to the lucky few who are capable of experiencing love and loss as intensely as Gary Lightbody? Did that first kiss really feel “like a planet forming,” or is he just happy to see us? There are regal drum rolls, declarative lyrics about our collective existential predicament, and some well-placed profanity: “Shouldn’t need to be this fucking hard/It’s just life on Earth,” Lightbody snarls. Then a chorus lifts like velvet curtains. The intro is all shimmering acoustic guitars in negative space. No one’s asking the band to address the totality of life on Earth, although that’s exactly what they attempt to do on Wildness’ opener, “Life on Earth,” a by-the-book grasp at gravity. “Friends and foes and princes/Are all just human in the end,” Lightbody preaches on “Empress,” before insisting, “This is so damn simple.” Perhaps it’s willfully naive as well, but you come to Snow Patrol for consolation, not confrontation. To some extent, this seems to have been Lightbody’s intention: He aimed for “clarity and connection” on Wildness, a familiar and canny pivot for intensely apolitical acts who want to acknowledge the world’s sad state of affairs without risking any blowback. Their most personal album deals in matters of literal life and death and can get shrugged off like waiting room music. This is a band that once gave silence at the breakfast table the gravity of a nuclear standoff.
It’s a cruel twist of fate that Snow Patrol fail to come up with some worthy syncs for a “Grey’s Anatomy” script when they’ve practically lived in one. Wildness was inspired by Lightbody’s struggle with sobriety, his father’s battle with dementia, a crippling fear of losing his edge as an artist, and-why not?-a headline-making new love interest for new guitar player Johnny McDaid. On their first album in seven years, Snow Patrol don’t need Shonda Rhimes to amp up the drama. took his final, swooning breaths to “ Chasing Cars” in the Season 2 finale-and then the show’s cast performed it in the musical episode “ Grey’s Anatomy: The Music Event.” In the early 2000s, Snow Patrol became inextricably connected with the ABC medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy.” Gary Lightbody and his band were a constant at Seattle Grace as the rotating cast of residents flirted with disaster, death, and (mostly) each other.
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