Chromatics - Kill For Love

Everyone likes a narrative, and Chromatics have woven a fair few in and around their music – there’s the shift the band undertook in the mid-00s from unspectacular guitar band to streamlined synth collective with ambition, driven (it would appear) by Johnny Jewel. There’s also the cinematic narratives that have formed the basis for the band’s long-players – 2007’s breakthrough Night Drive loosely gestured towards the idea that it might soundtrack one woman’s post-club, late night car journey, while Kill For Love comes with its own film poster, suggesting that we’re listening to a soundtrack for something here, without ever revealing exactly what that might be. Finally, there’s the narrative of the long-delayed follow-up album finally emerging – fans and critics have been waiting for Kill For Love for years, Jewel has been toiling away, narrowing 36 tracks of music down to the tracklist’s final 17 (he lists “blood, sweat, tears” at the end of a list of instrumentation on his soundcloud page) and the album cover looks not unlike that of another album which emerged triumphantly after a long, torturous gestation period.

In many ways, your appreciation of Chromatics’ new album will depend on how you engage with these narratives – how far you want to herald Kill For Love will depend on how far you enter into the album’s cinematic landscape. The landscape on Kill For Love – and the narrative or storyline within it – is vast but vague, seductive but also kind of cold. Across the album’s first six tracks, these contradictions don’t seem to matter so much – the title-track’s Jesus-And-Mary-Chain-gone-disco turn is a simple stroke of genius, while ‘Lady’ is Ruth Radelet’s best vocal performance, all beautiful detachment over ‘I Feel Love’ beats and the kind of bassline that has been begging for a revival. Then there’s ‘These Streets Will Never Look The Same’, which is the perfect marriage of widescreen ambition, building slowly across 8 divine minutes, with a mournful male vocoder vocal and irresistibly sad hooks. It’s at moments like this that you really believe in Chromatics’ desire to soundtrack the movie in your head.

The trouble is the sheer ambition and imagination that has gone into Kill For Love is also its downside – stretching across an hour and a half, it becomes increasingly dominated by creeping ambient passages, which are beautiful and unsettling when you’re paying attention, but increasingly likely to fade into the background. To be fair, this seems to have been Jewel’s intention – he’s spoken on numerous occasions of his admiration for film soundtracks from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, of the way disco music sounded, to him, like wallpaper. And that’s exactly how Kill For Love sounds: it was, after all, uploaded to soundcloud by Jewel himself in it’s uninterrupted entirety, so it’s presumably intended that we should treat Kill For Love like a film – dim the lights, get comfortable, and get ready to be transported elsewhere for an hour and a half.

But where exactly? Kill For Love is heavy on the atmosphere, the broad strokes, the panoramic ambient passages, the half-mumbled, vague lyrics, but light on details, on characters, on moments you can actually engage with rather than just passively admire as admittedly very beautiful interpretations of Jewel’s beloved influences. It’s a soundtrack to an imaginary film then, much like the work Jewel released as Symmetry at the end of last year, but one that asks you to do much of the imagining, filling in the gaps in the narrative that Chromatics have loosely imagined just enough to inform their own aesthetic but without any actual substance.

To criticise an album for not wholly delivering on its concept is perhaps a little unfair – Chromatics do a far better job at delivering a long form, ambitious album built around retro themes than M83 did on the filler-heavy Hurry Up We’re Dreaming from last year. But then I think about other albums that have embraced a loose concept recently – the Diddy Dirty Money album from last year for instance, or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or even Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded – which were at least fun and engaging as well as ridiculous and completely alien. At times, in contrast, Kill For Love can veer towards self-conscious, stylish music for a particularly icy dinner party. When the pop songs re-emerge towards the back end of the album the atmosphere does thaw again, but you can’t help feeling that Kill For Love is as flawed as it is impressive, and, like a Hollywood movie, makes grand gestures while actually saying very little.