Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 10/04/2012 at 5:28 PM News

The Popdust Files: adele, Skyfall

Yeah, it probably would’ve been more poetic if we’d waited till 7:07 to hear the damn thing, but we didn’t feel like waiting that long. So we hopped over to Idolator, where they have Adele’s title theme to the upcoming James Bond flickSkyfall in its entirety, as ripped from some French radio broadcast. (Or maybe that’s just a weird part of the song’s intro—guess we’ll see for sure in about 90 minutes.)

We basically already got the gist of the song from the 90-second preview that leaked a couple days ago, and though the full song runs a couple extra minutes, there’s not a lot more to really talk about here. Though the song appropriately big-sounding, with the strings and the widescreen production and all that, Adele never quite goes for the gusto like we hope, doing some “Set Fire to the Rain”-style runs up the octave during the outro, but otherwise mostly sounding a little reserved and wispier than we would have expected. Maybe not fair to always expect a vocal performance at ten from Adele—especially while she’s carrying—but hey, she’s spoiled us like that.

It’s a good song, and a worthy Bond theme, but while it should do much commercially than recent entries in the franchise from Chris Cornell and Jack White & Alicia Keys—some are even predicting it might break iTunes records—it’s not quite the home run we were expecting, and maybe a little less interesting than those other songs.