Sometimes an album just falls out of the air and into your lap. Sometimes this happens for the listener and maybe sometimes it happens for the artist too, but an album like this can stand alone as one enjoyable length of music, regardless of the rest of a band’s catalogue. Sometimes a group of people just gets it right, and that would be the album Night Drive by The Chromatics.I have been drawn to female vocalists in The Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance, the techno edge of their work with Future Sound of London. Portishead has always had a dark disdainful sound, and I like the German brooding of Chicks on Speed, but Night Drive is an album of Italo-Disco, an old style re-invented by a group of Portland musicians on Italians Do It Better. If I could make up the story, it seems like the first stab by a new collection of musicians at a new sound, eager to get away from a punk background but still aware of a specific target; a sparsely instrumented, intentionally repetitive collection of euro synth-pop songs that at first comes up like background music, until you find yourself spacing out on it, or singing the hooks a couple of days later.
Night Drive starts with street noise and a phone conversation as a girl leaves a club and starts her car, then her drive takes you through scenic landscapes and sound structures that are only appreciated fully when the album is enjoyed from beginning to end. Like an orchestral composition, there are movements and rhythms that vary like the idea suggested by the title. Then the album comes to an end like the end of the night, or early morning, the two times I find myself playing this music the most.
Personally, there are some musicians whom I know as personalities and myths before I know their music. Then there are musicians whom I know only through their music. That would be The Chromatics, but when Ruth Radelet sings “Oh, little stranger“, I want to be there with her, and I want to see the sun disappear.
