a thread for Italians Do It Better

title track on this is pretty awesome

not use how far into it I will get before I lose focus though

this could blow up pretty big if everyone who swooned over that kavinksy track gets into it

otm

ok i was wrong about p4k

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16452-kill-for-love/

Really like "kill for love" although, somehow, I feel like it's not as good as I'd like it to be after the intro.
I'm quite excited by this album, going to order it now !

it's a really icy, arms-length sort of album. full of repetitive, spacey probable-creepers. good on first listen, but looking forward to relating to this more when i'm feeling, i dunno, a bit more patient and/or nostalgic.

just ordered it on their blog. it's pretty cheap !

These Streets Will Never Look The Same yall

this is dope as fuck. heavy too. the neil young opener is exciting!

man idk if I should wait for the vinyl w/ mp3 codes

Excellent album.

These Streets Will Never Look The Same yall

― caulk the wagon and float it, Tuesday, April 3, 2012 8:37 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes this

not sure if i "get" this album. sounds very nice, icy and inviting at the same time, provides a comfortably inhabitable atmosphere all the way through, but nothing's really grabbing me on the first pass. in enjoy the vibe more than the songwriting, and as a result, i frequently find my attention wandering. more well-crafted persona than seriously engaging personality, at least on the first pass. guess that's sort of their stock-in-trade, though...

maybe it's just the length of the thing that's making it hard to digest. have liked them primarily as a singles band in the past.

Johnny Jewel is definitely determined to get you to devote a lot of your time to his music this year

hah, for real.

he should do a 10 album set with e-40

id like to go on record saying that i think Johnny Jewel is an epic rock n roll stage name for the ages

plus a damn fine song

Will the vinyl have No Escape on it?

Okay, so I've spent a bit of time w this over the last few days. I get it even less than I did before. This is honestly one of the laziest, emptiest and least engaging albums I've heard in a long, long time. I understand that the stasis and vacuity are not just intentional but by and large "the point", but nothing is done to make the nothingness interesting or musically compelling. It's a more or less entirely blank slate against which a few obvious influences are allowed to play. The hooks are few and far between, the melodies aren't moving or memorable, the beats plod along dully without groove or propulsion, and the tones are steadfastly generic. It sounds like a drug-deadened indietronic spin on the wallpaper mood music you hear in Starbucks.

I'm not saying there aren't standout songs. "Candy" and "These Streets Will Never Look the Same" are both pretty great, working as pop without losing the creepy-cool designer zombie vibe (autotune is a much better vehicle for this kind of narcotized robot lounge music than breathy human affectlessness, imo). Unfortunately, most of the rest is oppressively boring.

also, re the neil young cover, the breathy-voiced and pindrop quiet indie cover of a pop and/or classic rock staple is such an exhausted trick at this point. at least in most cases the reinvention brings something new to the song. here it just strips away the raw and wounded defeat in favor of emotionally inert high-end furniture arrangement. i feel like i'm playing into their hands in calling it "lifeless", but that's exactly what it is, and in a bad way. like the cowboy junkies with a nondescript, careless singer and no real ear for atmospherics. do like the electronic droning and beeping at the end, but that's the only thing chromatics bring to the song.

hmm maybe start a blog about it?

wonderful suggestion, matt

did you like the last album?

i didn't love it, no, but i didn't find it anywhere near so draggy and tedious as KFL, maybe just a product of relative brevity

helps that the song "night drive" is right up front, feel like KFL makes me wait forever for something i actually want to hear.

and i don't know why "i want your love" appeals to me so much more than similar stuff on KFL, but it does. something agreeably scrapy/scrappy music that makes virtue of the dead-end vocal.

I think I'm enjoying these descriptions of why you dislike the record more than anything.

i think i really like this, maybe as much as night drive, dont get how the neil young cover is an exhausted gimmick.

I don't have a sophisticated defense of this, maybe I like the idea of "a drug-deadened indietronic spin on the wallpaper mood music you hear in Starbucks"? Although I suspect that might actually apply as a description of another artist...

I should say, I have actually have been listening to this over my morning coffee!

Don't agree that the melodies are moving or memorable in any case, at least for the first half of the album. I haven't had enough time to absorb the rest yet.

Last time I was in a Starbucks they played Paul Simon and the Decemberists and shit.
To be honest I would probably really like to sit in a nice, non-sbux coffee place while Symmetry played quietly.

Don't agree that the melodies AREN'T moving or memorable, I should say, obv.

i'm not so big on breathy-indie-covers as i was, i dunno, ten years ago, but on the neil young cover when i hear 'rock and roll is here to stay' i don't think 'indie cover', i hear them saying: this IS rock and roll, and for some reason i believe it.

i was a jerk about this. the starbucks slam was cheap, and saying that chromatics have "no ear for atmospherics" was absolute horseshit. that's the one thing they really do nail. the soundtracky instrumental pieces are some of the best tracks on here.

it's not so much that it's a bad album, but that i was struggling w it and frustrated. i've listened to kill for love a few more times now, and while i might not ever love it, i'm starting to come around. after venting, i asked myself why i was faulting this music so severely for for its "emptiness". if music music creates a generally pleasant atmosphere, why shouldn't that be enough? i had to admit that i was making an implicit demand that music w vocals and pop structures be insistently "engaging" on some level, that droning along pleasantly was cheating somehow, especially if the music seemed "stylish". once i had all that out in the open, i realized i couldn't really defend any of it.

i'm finding that kill for love is very well suited to half-distracted road listening. it's a somnambulent-romantic horror movie, and the dead-eyed vacancy helps tell the story and build the vibe. details like the dixie cup of blood are coming into focus. and the way "into the black" turns neil into "ventura highway" is starting to seem p funny & cool.

contie you should listen to this on a lonely night spent walking

lol, it's funny you should say that. i visited some friends yesterday, and by the time i got there, it was dark. walking through suburbia at night w this on headphones really helped me get where it was coming from and what it might be suited to.

Was thinking of posting earlier on in the discussion that it's a great album for listening to while doing something else - I've been listening to it a lot at work this week. This is not a bad thing! Quality mood music is always welcome.

I'm loving the Chromatics album but I agree it's too much of a good thing. If they'd cut through all the meandering bullshit it would be one of the top 10 of the year for me. Some of the songs get ruined by their length... too much tension for too little payoff.

Kill for Love, Into the Black, At Your dOOR and Back from the Grave are tracks of the year tho.

Despite all of this I haven't found anything distracting me from enjoying the record all the way through. Funny since the last record I put so much effort trying to like, and while I did, I always felt it was carried by style points severely outweighing content. The new one is totally great, a good counter point to my usual noisy 90s indie.

i love how she sings 'i took a pill almost every niiiight'

^^^^^ yeah this

title track has kind of a Jesus & Mary Chain / shoegaze feeling going on that I love

Yeah, that line is great.

Part 3...

Okay, so I've been listening to this album for three weeks straight now and am starting to fall in love. I initially disliked Kill for Love quite strongly (see above). I felt that its accolades were lazy and undeserved, that it was little more than an unfocused exercise in cynical, vacant and rather tediously predictable style. I wanted to dismiss it with prejudice, but felt that I should get to know it in order to more effectively eviscerate its pretensions. Thing is, the more I listened to it, the more distinctive and mysterious it came to seem. The melodies, textures and narratives didn't jump out and grab me at first, but I found that no matter how much I listened, I could neither satisfactorily solve for them nor leave them alone.

Two weeks ago, I allowed that I was "starting to come around". Now I'm almost certain that Kill for Love will wind up being one of my favorite albums of the year. Maybe that's a simple product of time invested, but there aren't many new records that I'd care to listen to 20 or 30 times in the space of a month, and fewer that I could still be productively exploring by that point. I'll happily admit that I don't fully "get" Chromatics, because that's what keeps me coming back.

The first thing I want to talk about here is the idea of distance. Over the past couple weeks, I've read a great many reviews of both Night Drive and Kill for Love, and I'm surprised at how little attention most critics have paid to the way Chromatics "distress" their sound through the application of faux vinyl crackle. This strategy is quite prominent on both albums, and it distances the listener from the music in at least three ways. First, it creates an illusion of separation in time. We are listening to something that does not exist in the now, but is instead arriving to us from the past, from the vinyl-only era of postpunk, Italo-disco and Carpenter-style synth horror soundtracks. The second way the distressed sound distances us is by calling attention to the mechanics of audio reproduction. We are not allowed to sink into the music as immediate/vicarious experience because we are constantly reminded that it is being brought to us via the agency of a medium. The effect is similar to that produced by scratches and dirt on an old motion picture film print. We cannot fully inhabit the vision because we are forced to notice the screen on which it is projected. Finally, the "surface noise" distances us from the music simply by obscuring it. At 2:14 in Chromatics' cover of kate bush's "Running Up That Hill", Ruth Radlet's voice is momentarily lost in distortion and crackle. Here the distancing actually eclipses the music for a moment. This trick is duplicated on the Kill for Love track "Birds of Paradise".

Chromatics' use of this kind of distancing is interesting to me because it helps make sense of their overall aesthetic and approach. When Night Drive came out in 2007, most critics addressed the band's radical shift from fragmentary postpunk rock to sleek, club-friendly electropop, but few admitted how little they'd really changed. Skeletality, noise, mechanical disaffection and staggered rhythms were a big part of the early Chromatics' game, and these are still some of the key elements of their sound. Night Drive and Kill for Love may sound slick and synthetic on the surface, but the individual sonic elements of which they're composed are often quite harsh and awkward. We hear fingers on strings, piercing highs and layers of hissing, curdled static. The rhythmic propulsion is often slightly awkward, lacking dance music's in-the-pocket drive, and most of the tracks feel weirdly scooped out, as though several key elements were missing. Riding over all this discombobulated emptiness is ruth radlet's paper thin whisper of a voice. She has no range to speak of and almost no expressive power. Her singing denies us even electroclash's comedy of confrontational disaffection.

These elements and approaches combine to create an interesting inversion of way "humanity" is conventionally constructed in pop. To some degree or another, we typically equate musical humanity with emotionalism and sentiment. Chromatics flip this completely on its head. In their music, the humanity is the inexpressive. It's the rhythm that doesn't quite come together, the hiccup in the bassline, the failure of the vocals to hit notes or convey emotion. Surrounding this frail and complacent vision of humanity are the mechanisms of music and sound: icy synth arpeggios and plodding drum machines, a fixation on medium and technology, the familiar phrases and melodies that pop songs ordinarily use to convey and induce feeling.

The problem with Kill for Love, mentioned by most critics, is that it's a sprawling, unfocused mess. Not only is it overburdened with second-rate filler, it's very poorly sequenced. Everyone seems to love the band's cover of "Into the Black", but to my mind, this is the song that plays over the end credits. It simply doesn't work as an opening theme. (And I'd like to object very strongly to the Pitchfork review's contention that it is in any sense a "deconstruction" of Neil Young's original. It is not. It does nothing particular novel to or with the song. It does not cause it say anything it didn't say the first time around. It is simply a cover. A nice one, but by no means a reinvention, illumination or deconstruction.) The album's running order as released puts too much emphasis on crispy, brittle, bleach-blonde sunshine up front, sickly horror soundtrack darkness towards the back. Both wear out their welcome, which is unfortunate because there are at least as many worthwhile songs on Kill for Love as there were on Night Drive. The playlist version I'm currently enjoying:

1) Dust to Dust
2) These Streets Will Never Look The Same
3) Kill for Love
4) The Page
5) Candy
6) There's a Light Out On the Horizon
7) Lady
8) Birds of Paradise
9) The River
10) Running from the Sun
11) Into the Black

could you elaborate

i dunno, there's probably a good rimshot gif out there somewhere

(see above)

shoulda been an in-thread anchor-link

thought about it

with parenthetical references

(contenderizer 2012a)

anyway, a bit surprising that of the most popular chromatics tunes on spotify, only one is from night drive (the single edit of "tick of the clock"). rounding out the top five are three tracks from the in the city EP and "hands in the dark" from the after dark comp. wonder if night drive has only recently been added though.

I bought Night Drive on iTunes when it came out. "Tick of the Clock" makes sense because it was on the Drive soundtrack.

"In the City" also had a video and some degree of promotion.