Having been away for rather longer than many seminal bands’ suspiciously momentary hiatuses – both them and us both – it’s a true joy to welcome Blue Hawaii back into being; not least because comeback track No One Like You is sweet like a certain Shanks & Bigfoot single, by way of faintly conflicted millennial longing and feel-good gold mined from altogether longer ago. (It’s a superlatively athletic rework of Kenix’ Bobby Youngblood-featuring crate-digger gold dust, There’s Never Been (No One Like You), after all.) For it’s not simply a similarly ephemeral reference to “remember[ing] the good times” which brings to mind so many a Nile Rodgers production, the meandering bass lines that strut throughout its final minute incontrovertibly evocative of Bernard Edwards, entangled as they are in strings reminiscent of, for instance, Andy Butler’s Hercules’ Theme. But perhaps most pertinently, as Raphaelle Standell pleads, “Say that we will grow up/ Together, and not apart”, this is markedly – even remarkably – more mature a release than Untogether all those years ago. So go surround yourself with this sunny number below…
No One Like You is lifted from their forthcoming sophomore full-length, Tenderness, which is available from October 6th via Arbutus Records, while Blue Hawaii play The Pickle Factory on November 21st.