Kill for Love
Chromatics
2012
I get the sense that people enjoy this album because it sounds like a film soundtrack, and that might be the same exact reason that I can't get into as much as I want to. From my perspective, people are saying that because a lot of the songs have a similar feeling and sound to them, kinda dreamy, lots of hazy synths, all of them bleeding into one another, laid-back instrumentals filling the cracks in between Ruth Radelet's almost mystical mezzo-soprano. Perfect for a film. Someone in a comment section even claimed that Kill for Love was literally a film, but they just hadn't seen it. That's a bit too much for me. I get that this would be perfect for an arthouse film, but it doesn't make sense to talk in these terms if there is no actual movie attached.
Who knows, maybe people only think this way about Kill for Love because Chromatics had a song on the Drive soundtrack, and Chromatics' Johnny Jewel was originally slated to produce that soundtrack. This is probably how Kill for Love even ended up on this list in the first place (it being one of the more modern Blind Spots I've included in this column)—Drive has a soundtrack that is ostensibly important to the indie rock community, and Chromatics are a big part of that, if not on the tracklist then definitely in its overall gestalt.
In order for an album to be perceived as a "blind spot," then there must be some legends or myths attached to it, I would think. Or else I would have never heard of the artist, and thus wouldn't make me consider myself "blind" to the music. After a week with Chromatics, I'm starting to think that the myth outsizes the music itself. Before I knew anything about Kill for Love, I knew that there was a band called Chromatics who had been hyping up a follow-up album for almost a decade, allegedly called Dear Tommy. I'd see this album near the top of every "Most Anticipated Albums of Next Year" list every December. But then it took so long that the band broke up before it ever came out. I'm not saying I was invested in the myth, but I am saying that the myth was so large that even I, a music listener who never heard one single note of Chromatics outside a film, was aware of it.
The mythical nature of Chromatics doesn't get me to appreciate their music more, though, and I guess that's the problem. It almost makes me mistrust it a little bit, if that's the door I'm entering their world through. For a lot of my week, I was convinced that I had accidentally downloaded alternate takes of some of these songs. The Wikipedia page indicates that there are different mixes out there, including one that doesn't include any drums. And I'm listening to songs like "The Eleventh Hour" and I'm like, there's no fucking way that this critically acclaimed album sounds like this, like an instrumental that stretches on to eternity and finally fades into complete silence. And I'm listening on YouTube and hear vocals on "Candy" that I don't recognize and I'm thinking, I definitely fucking downloaded an instrumental version of "Candy" by mistake. But no—I move back to the iPod, and the vocals were there the whole time. I just didn't notice them. They faded into the background during my listens.
This might say a lot about the detrimental effects of the iffy means of obtaining music through the internet's back channels that I employ each week, but the other point is that this music was mediocre enough that it very often faded into the background. And that's what film soundtracks are supposed to do! Work in the background while the action takes place on screen! Were Kill to Love actually a soundtrack, then maybe it'd feel right to praise it in its proper context. As it stands now, the main problem is that its pretending to be something it's not. Or, more accurately, its fans are pretending that the album is something it is not.
This is all a fancy way of saying that this album is Not For Me. As with most of the albums in this column that aren't met with effusive praise, it's not bad, and there are some aspects to it that I appreciate, and I think that it can function in certain ways ("vibe" music) and be successful. But the bar is set impossibly high when we're talking about "classic" albums, and in my experience with Chromatics this week, they don't clear the bar.
But listen to it anyway, and maybe tell me I'm wrong. Or, we can all just get together and watch Drive again instead.
Who knows, maybe people only think this way about Kill for Love because Chromatics had a song on the Drive soundtrack, and Chromatics' Johnny Jewel was originally slated to produce that soundtrack. This is probably how Kill for Love even ended up on this list in the first place (it being one of the more modern Blind Spots I've included in this column)—Drive has a soundtrack that is ostensibly important to the indie rock community, and Chromatics are a big part of that, if not on the tracklist then definitely in its overall gestalt.
In order for an album to be perceived as a "blind spot," then there must be some legends or myths attached to it, I would think. Or else I would have never heard of the artist, and thus wouldn't make me consider myself "blind" to the music. After a week with Chromatics, I'm starting to think that the myth outsizes the music itself. Before I knew anything about Kill for Love, I knew that there was a band called Chromatics who had been hyping up a follow-up album for almost a decade, allegedly called Dear Tommy. I'd see this album near the top of every "Most Anticipated Albums of Next Year" list every December. But then it took so long that the band broke up before it ever came out. I'm not saying I was invested in the myth, but I am saying that the myth was so large that even I, a music listener who never heard one single note of Chromatics outside a film, was aware of it.
The mythical nature of Chromatics doesn't get me to appreciate their music more, though, and I guess that's the problem. It almost makes me mistrust it a little bit, if that's the door I'm entering their world through. For a lot of my week, I was convinced that I had accidentally downloaded alternate takes of some of these songs. The Wikipedia page indicates that there are different mixes out there, including one that doesn't include any drums. And I'm listening to songs like "The Eleventh Hour" and I'm like, there's no fucking way that this critically acclaimed album sounds like this, like an instrumental that stretches on to eternity and finally fades into complete silence. And I'm listening on YouTube and hear vocals on "Candy" that I don't recognize and I'm thinking, I definitely fucking downloaded an instrumental version of "Candy" by mistake. But no—I move back to the iPod, and the vocals were there the whole time. I just didn't notice them. They faded into the background during my listens.
This might say a lot about the detrimental effects of the iffy means of obtaining music through the internet's back channels that I employ each week, but the other point is that this music was mediocre enough that it very often faded into the background. And that's what film soundtracks are supposed to do! Work in the background while the action takes place on screen! Were Kill to Love actually a soundtrack, then maybe it'd feel right to praise it in its proper context. As it stands now, the main problem is that its pretending to be something it's not. Or, more accurately, its fans are pretending that the album is something it is not.
This is all a fancy way of saying that this album is Not For Me. As with most of the albums in this column that aren't met with effusive praise, it's not bad, and there are some aspects to it that I appreciate, and I think that it can function in certain ways ("vibe" music) and be successful. But the bar is set impossibly high when we're talking about "classic" albums, and in my experience with Chromatics this week, they don't clear the bar.
But listen to it anyway, and maybe tell me I'm wrong. Or, we can all just get together and watch Drive again instead.
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