Kodaline – ‘High Hopes’

21 March 2013

Where are you Kodaline hipsters to tell me you preferred them when they were 21 Demands? Okay, I throw down that gauntlet knowing full well that Kodaline fandom doesn’t really lend itself to hipsterism. Chart factoids, though, are always hip, and this is a band who’ve had two Irish number one singles under two different names – plus that first single, ‘Give Me A Minute’ in 2007, was the first digital-only release to top the Irish charts.

Playing devil’s advocate / Kodaline hipster here, I note that ‘Give Me A Minute’ by 21 Demands was green and scattered, but it at least tended towards an energetic punk-pop sound. ‘High Hopes’ by Kodaline, though, is semi-acoustic Script: performatively sensitive indie-adjacent young-dad-rock for the Coldplay fan who wants to shop local. It settles for vague bluster about feelings, served on a bed of cliched signifiers like the melancholic opening piano and the melodramatic second-verse drum drop. I can hear how you may have dug this if your go-to portal for new music was the soundtrack to Grey’s Anatomy, and I mean that to hurt.

Speaking of melodrama, the video below is just the song’s audio. The actual video for ‘High Hopes’ starts with a character preparing to commit an act of terminal self-harm and ends with a scorned male love interest committing an act of violence against a female ex-partner whose role is little more than male-chattel-as-plot-device. Funny how those performative, blustery feelings don’t leave much room for more discreet feelings like sensitivity or taste.