Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.
Consider Night Drive in some ways to be the first Chromatics full length album. Leading up to Night Drive there were various incarnations of the band between 2001 and 2006, namely with the moody heroin chop-up Chrome Rats vs. Basement Rutz in 2003 and with more no wave attitudes on {Plaster Hounds} in 2004. These permutations of the Pacific Northwest act do not exactly sound like perquisite forms for their tertiary follow up, an Italo disco soundtrack to an imaginary film about a girl standing outside of a nightclub who calls her boyfriend to let him know she’s going on a “drive” for about an hour before heading home for the night.
Enter Night Drive. The descriptor for Night Drive sounds like an overwrought approach to separating a dance aesthetic from a number of other disco revivalists, supported by record labels DFA, Modular and Ed Banger at the turn of the century. But with Adam Miller as the only surviving member of the brooding lo-fi version of Chromatics, open to Glass Candy producer Johnny Jewel, Night Drive was largely made without outside expectation from the public or the press.
The dreamy concept album, also called Original Motion Picture Soundtrack IV, noted as recorded and mixxed (sic) at Suite 304 exclusively for Italians Do It Better Films MMVII on vinyl and CD jackets, works on several levels. Forsaking crude organic drums and inviting warm synthesizers and programmed drums, Chromatics’ Night Drive enjoys Jewel’s fancy fingers for the time as well as Ruth Radelet’s elusive husk whispers. Musically, the transition was more of a transfusion. Sultry original material like “I Want Your Love” and “Mask” spliced with danceable Halloween I – IV-invoked “The Killing Spree” and “Tomorrow Is So Far Away” play almost aggregatively to hi-jacked material, including the electro cover of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” and “Healer,” and winking less than obviously at Joy Division’s “Shadow Play.” Patches of deep synth tones sometimes signal at the darkly felt romance of the Italo disco universe. “Tick of the Clock,” featured in this year’s violent Ryan Gosling smash up road film Drive crystallizes the blood, sweat and two-stepping of the genre. Revisiting the 2007 Night Drive eerily confirms the Nicolas Winding Refn directed Drive four years later as fantasy and ambition realized for Jewel and Miller. The soundtrack for Drive acknowledges the thickness of their vision that paradoxically combines the living, the dead, the ’80s and the now. Thematically, the album is stark with style but not overdriven with motif. Ideas about costumes, narcotics and getting lost behind the wheel in the middle of the night are subtle enough, warranting it as a serious effort combining what constitutes a band turning a new sound but what also constitutes cinema.
The sound of Night Drive is not easily available for ready genre descriptors. To say Miller’s guitar is post-punk would undercut the precision with which it was recorded, mixed and placed among the sparkle of something thought to have been over-mined and overdone: disco. And to simply call Chromatics circa Night Drive disco revivalists who took P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights as a call to arms would be to dismiss a kind of rare and natural commitment not every artist can find to an alternate reality. In the way Anthony Gonzalez has made M83 albums in the past, for instance, by believing fully in the world of John Hughes and recognizing it as the impetus for Saturdays = Youth, Chromatics sought something outside the postmodern delight of pastiche and influence – subconsciously or consciously I cannot be certain. This is to say that Night Drive, for all its tenuous intimacy taking place in the shadows of a dancehall, it is not so much of an infusion of disco noir and sparse punk guitars or a particular film, as it is a careful consideration of sonic landscapes that once were and sonic worlds that could be. For projects like Chromatics Night Drive – created independently of a scene and without an expectation based on previous success – impact is contingent upon how far you are willing to let fantasy supervene your senses.
NIGHT DRIVE by ITALIANS DO IT BETTER
