Album review: Kodaline, In a Perfect World (B-Unique)

An Irish quartet with sights clearly set on the world's stadiums, Kodaline offer a musical barometer of bankable current rock trends, but display scant originality on this debut album.

Titles like “High Hopes”, “Brand New Day” and “Big Bad World” indicate the pasteurised, bloodless fare on offer here, with individual tracks styled around specific influences: the ersatz Keane sincerity of “After the Fall”, the strumming Mumfordry of “Love Like This”, the Coldplay-style piano and falsetto vocal catch of “All I Want”. Whether lamenting lost love, or fretting over the meaning of life and “what it's all about”, the songs are uniformly inflated to arena-size by blustery arrangements and singalong hooks, most pneumatically of all in “One Day”.

Download: One Day; All I Want