You can’t fault the timing of Kodaline’s record company. RCA presumably have a bank of eggheads working in a basement somewhere under their New York Headquarters running complex predictive algorithms to check the likely content of the British summer. They could have just asked someone. The streets of London are full to the fucking brim of people smugly opining that this burst of beautiful clear skies and occasional warmth won’t even last until summer actually starts, let alone across July and August. “A love like this won’t last forever”, Kodaline tell us; the RCA boffins clearly see the same to be true for this sunshine. On that basis, best get your breezy summer tunes out early and capitalise while you still can.
And that is what we have here. Cheerfully-paced strumming acoustic guitars, some half-arsed whistling (this guy is no Otis Redding), a little bit of organ, some mandolin and, just in case we were in any doubt about the upbeatness of this tune, ‘sun’ gets mentioned enough times in short succession as to make you reach for the factor 50.
It’s all a bit ‘ok’, to be honest. Nothing particularly exciting happens over the course of its three and a half minutes, but then nothing particularly offensive happens either (although they could have ditched the two brief bits of talking, I’m never sure that folky-indie needs the hype man touch). It’s a perfectly reasonable song – perhaps that’s the problem. I’m sure that this will rotate pretty heavily as a result but it’s already fading from my memory as I type this, and I’ve got much more exciting things to write about. Watch this space….
