Kill for Love

Chromatics formed in the Pacific Northwest as a rickety no-wave band more than a decade ago, but re-emerged in the mid-2000s with a revamped lineup and a new sound that nicely coincided with a resurgence of interest in the slow, dreamy, not-always-Italian dance-pop subgenre known as Italo disco. As with other acts on New Jersey-based Italians Do It Better, a label co-founded by group mastermind Johnny Jewel, Chromatics didn't just incorporate the vocoders and vintage synth arpeggios of the turn-of-the-1980s originals, they added the brittle guitars, dubby reverb, and urban dread of post-punk. In the years since, the label's emphasis on grainy synths, smokey ambience, and analog-fetishizing textures became the M. O. of an entire class of artists. And the band's 2007 Night Drive set the blueprint for last year's Nicolas Winding Refn-directed thriller Drive; featuring two Jewel-assisted tracks, the film's soundtrack exposed this music to a wider audience. Earlier this year, Jewel built on that momentum by releasing a two-hour epic created with fellow Chromatics member Nat Walker. Titled Symmetry, Themes for an Imaginary Film, the set culled material from a full score that the duo were said to have composed for Drive. 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