Here's a depressing exercise: Sit down and try to figure out how many of the bigger alt-rock bands that emerged this past decade will one day crank out a half-decent greatest-hits album. It's a short list. The White Stripes will release a great one. So will Coldplay, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Killers. Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party have a chance, and Tegan and Sara could get there, too. And... that's pretty much it. Many of the great alt-rock artists of this decade were also the great alt-rock artists of the decade before-- Radiohead, Beck, Björk, the Flaming Lips, etc. With radio going directly into the shitter, most good rock bands haven't had a chance to make anything that could, even charitably, be regarded as a hit. Sorry, Animal Collective. The whole function of a greatest-hits album-- to rescue transcendent pop singles from shitty or just-OK albums-- doesn't even make sense when transcendent, monocultural pop is something that barely even exists anymore.
Given a few more OK albums, widescreen MOR archdukes Snow Patrol might've snuck their way into the above paragraph. Snow Patrol have always come across like a more workmanlike Coldplay. Same celestial choruses, same overwhelming sense of longing, same epic U2-derived comfort-food melodies. But with Snow Patrol, you never get the idea that they're out to save the world or get their faces plastered up 80 feet high in Times Square. Even their biggest, most heartstring-yanking tunes ("Chasing Cars", "Run") concern simple and relatable experiences: falling in love and shutting the whole world out, or falling out of love and feeling your whole world crumble. They're good at what they do, and they've quietly built up a deeply solid and satisfying run of singles. It shouldn't be a problem for these guys to slap together 12 of their biggest and call it a day.
That's not what they do on Up to Now. Instead, the band has to throw every goddamn thing at the wall: singles, sure, but also B-sides and unreleased tracks and covers and side-project joints and live tracks. If you just want to hear the hits, you're not going to need a set of random tracks from the Reindeer Section, the Scottish indie supergroup that Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody also leads in his spare time. And if you're such a die-hard Snow Patrol completist that you need all their shitty B-sides, you're... well, I don't know what the hell your deal is, but you probably don't need to own "Chasing Cars" again. The result: two deeply overstuffed CDs with a few great moments but just as many songs that nobody will ever need to hear a second time.
The worst excess on the whole set is the band's half-joking "Crazy in Love" cover, which-- unlike, say, Antony's version-- does not excise the Jay-Z verse. Instead, someone from the band has to fuck around with one of those awful joke-rap voices. Jay-Z's cultural references must not have quite the same currency in Britain, since whoever takes the verse gets a few things blatantly, hilariously wrong; "Handle like Van Exel" becomes "candle like benex soup" or something. But even without the verse, it's the limpest, most unfunny MOR Brit-rock joke-cover since Travis did "Baby One More Time". Nearly as bad is the "Run" B-side "Post-Punk Progression", on which Lightbody flattens his voice into an imitation Ian Curtis mutter and repeats the same line again and again over a fake Joy Division crawl: "You won't be around forever, girl; you gotta grab life with both hands." Is the song a joke? I have no idea. I just know it has no place on what could've been a pretty great greatest-hits album.
The biggest problem, though, isn't the outright clunkers; it's the sheer length of the thing. Snow Patrol's basic sweep isn't the type of thing that holds up over two hours, and after the 20th straight-faced lovelorn hymn, you'll start climbing the walls. A crisp, chronologically sequenced set could've been a whole lot of fun-- we could've heard them evolve from the light Stereolab and Imperial Teen influences of their early days on Jeepster to the blandly expert arena jams they'd learn to crank out. But Up to Now just piles everything together and dares you to delete the extraneous stuff from your iTunes.
