Cascada – Summer of Love
It’s a summer jam… in the sense of being made entirely of fruit and sugar.
[Video][Website]
[4.55]
Sabina Tang: Delivers exactly what it says on the tin. Score is the baseline, to be upped by one point for every capoeira-fuelled beach party I manage to fit into my busy 2012 schedule.
[7]
Iain Mew: Cascada carry on being Cascada and show no signs of any change of direction. So why did I like the (similarly themed!) “San Francisco” that much more despite the differences being minuscule? The touch of knowing humour was probably the crucial difference as it definitely enlivened things compared to the straight down the line approach here.
[5]
Brad Shoup: With their single “San Francisco” in mind, I can only assume this is on a 1967 tip, not ’88 or even the present day. No landmarks here, not even the musical kind. Natalie sounds as great as ever, but what happened to the male counterpoint?
[4]
Andrew Ryce: One of the most infuriatingly catchy and aggressively generic European dance acts to strike gold in the Western world come up with a song called “Summer of Love.” What, was “Dance All Night” taken? At first this sounds like it’s gonna be some uplifting piano anthem, but then the grubby electro bass comes in and it sounds like everything else. The melody is sterling here, and she’s at least TRYING to have a personality this time. Those “whoa-ohs” in the first verse, hoo boy, I wanna go to THAT party. The chorus has this neat triple-thick build-up, drop after drop after drop, and bonus points for the overdriven Vengaboys synth. A future soundtrack to car commercials and travel agency advertisements, and the future soundtrack to every night at I spend at a gay club this summer — oh, fuck.
[7]
Anthony Easton: Ladies, but mostly Gentleman, on Pride Weekend, this is what the twink bar will be blasting, and the leather bar will pretend to hate. Take sides well in advance. (which would explain why it was released in March and not June.)
[4]
Jer Fairall: As much of a 90s throwback, really, as Yuck or The Joy Formidable or anything like that, this is club pop of a particularly Roxburian strain, as free of any animating personality or compelling subtext (or, hell, text) as it is of grating dubstep or shrill vulgarity. It is what it is, in other words, but what it is ain’t much.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Enunciating like a hotel magnate’s wife on Biarritz, Natalie Horler fulfills the title promise: a summer as endless as a sunrise on a postcard.
[3]
John Seroff: Even by Cascada standards, “Summer of Love” lacks creative drive; calling this paint-by-numbers is insulting to the diligent people who take the time to stir up the paint pot. It’s as good as purely derivative Ibiza dancepop reverse-engineered by aliens on a deadline can be.
[3]
Michaela Drapes: Cascada attempts to foist a summer jam on the populace; unfortunately, they forgot to check the calendar and arrived just a teensy bit early to the party with warmed-over hors d’ouvres from the frozen section of the SuperMegaEuroDance Hypermart.
[2]
Pete Baran: When do you release a song called “Summer Of Love”. Do you let it loose around June, when people have worked out it’s shaping up to be a summer of love? Do you release in in September, to celebrate what has surely been a summer full of love? Or do you check the meteorology stats and work out that when the clocks go forward is about the earliest anyone can claim it to be summer, and release your fizzy Cascada by numbers banger to allow everyone to believe it will indeed be a summer of love? The track is formulaic, the release schedule of rote, and mathematically we are probably due a summer of love (the fourth by my reckoning — last summer being the summer of fighting). If you say it, it may come true!
[6]
Edward Okulicz: As a TV station promo for its hot summer line-up, or the theme tune to the launch of a brand new cola, any given 30 seconds of this would do a good job. As a song, it overwhelms with how little it has to say and how little it does behind that. That being said, I would still dance to it if I were wasted. Does nothing to erase my impression that every Cascada song is more or less the same so you only need to keep the best example (i.e. “Everytime We Touch”).
[5]