Album Of The Week: Chromatics Kill For Love

Even though the score he created for the movie ended up unused, Drive is the best thing that could've ever happened to Johnny Jewel. Jewel is the hazy-synthpop producer and multi-instrumentalist behind groups like the Chromatics, Glass Candy, and Desire. Over the past few years, he's been one of the world's leading Italo-disco revivalists, the guy whose various projects did as much to bring back metronomic synth-disco as anyone, anywhere. But those different projects tended to blend into one another, and after a few years, they'd come to seem pretty monochromatic and limited. Drive changed that. Director Nicolas Winding Refn might not have used the score that Jewel and Chromatics bandmate Nat Walker put together for the movie, but he did use a ton of tracks from the Chromatics and other Jewel-associated groups on the soundtrack, as well as a synth-pulsing Cliff Martinez score that probably owed Jewel some aesthetic debt. (And anyway, Jewel and Walker ended up releasing that unused score as Symmetry.) In Drive, Refn found a tough, luminous emotional context for Jewel's music; of course that would be the sort of stuff that a soulfully tough romantic like Ryan Gosling's character would listen to while making extremely skillful and daring escapes. And I don't know if it's because of Drive or what, but Jewel and his Chromatics bandmates sound suddenly emboldened on the new Kill For Love.