Kill for Love, Chromatics' first album since Night Drive, finally gives this loosely associated, prematurely decayed musical aesthetic its magnum opus-- and brilliantly transcends it. The moonlit vibe of previous highlights like street-skulking stunner "In the City" or haunting Kate Bush cover "Running Up That Hill" recurs, and various tracks still crackle and pop with the all-too-mortal degradation of vinyl. And despite the unfinished-seeming recording quality of the music videos that preceded the album's release, the completed product also boasts some of the most engrossing synth-pop songs so far this year.
The 90-minute Kill for Love signals its tour-de-force ambitions from the opening track, a synth-draped cover of Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)". As with their past brooding renditions of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" or Dark Day's "Hands in the Dark", it's a thoroughly rewarding pop deconstruction, setting one of singer Ruth Radelet's most affecting performances against an evocatively restrained backdrop. "There's more to the picture than meets the eye," Radelet coos, in what emerges here as a key lyric. There's more to Kill for Love than the sum of its best songs.
That said, Kill for Love's clearest improvement over Night Drive comes in its impressive clutch of left-field synth-pop standouts. The pill-dropping insomniac rush of the title track is the most likely to propel Chromatics onto the kinds of late-night TV stages and festival billings lately seized by M83, but the existential ache of "Back From the Grave" is no less gorgeously catchy. The bleakly yearning "Lady" returns to the group's signature Italo glide but wisely ditches the robotic vocal effects of a previously released late-2005 recording. When Jewel suggested in a recent Pitchfork interview that he was more influenced by Madonna than by crate-digging Eurodisco rarities, it was logical to wonder if he was being falsely modest. That is, until hearing "These Streets Will Never Look the Same", which stretches "Eye of the Tiger"-like guitar tension into an eight-minute treatise on loneliness and includes the album's first male lead vocal, rendered cyborg-like by a vocal harmonizer. Or take the vampire-pallid lament "Running From the Sun", another male-led track, based on piano chords reminiscent of those found on Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time". Fans who discovered Chromatics through Drive will find plenty of easy entry points here.
Still, just as the pop songs on Kill for Love are more direct than on Night Drive, the interstitial tracks are also more expansive and abstract. "Time is stretching on/ And it keeps repeating/ As the beat goes on," Radelet sings, on the deceptively uptempo last-ditch plea "At Your Door", and those words could just as easily apply to the album's instrumentals (and near-instrumentals). Nevertheless, even the record's most ephemeral moments are more deeply engaging than their equivalents on the last album, livened up by disembodied vocals and orchestral touches. Though there appear to be as many references to walking and riding trains as to driving, the album is at least as cinematic as Themes for an Imaginary Film. In fact, the languorous "There's a Light Out on the Horizon" goes so far as to revive Night Drive's phone-call conceit, though with results that are more beautifully agonizing.
TRACKLISTING
01 INTO THE BLACK
02 KILL FOR LOVE
03 BACK FROM THE GRAVE
04 THE PAGE
05 LADY
06 THESE STREETS WILL NEVER LOOK THE SAME
07 BROKEN MIRRORS
08 CANDY
09 THE ELEVENTH HOUR
10 RUNNING FROM THE SUN
11 DUST TO DUST
12 BIRDS OF PARADISE
13 A MATTER OF TIME
14 AT YOUR DOOR
15 THERE'S A LIGHT OUT ON THE HORIZON
16 THE RIVER
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