About

How could we talk about Kavinsky without evoking the movie that introduced his music to the general public? Dazzling success of the independant film industry of the last decade, Drive is the kind of movies in which the soundtrack takes a front seat role. As in his previous realisations, Nicolas Winding Refn took great care, with the help of Cliff Martinez (former drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) to select the tracks that would feature in his latest movie. It's in this way he picked "Nightcall" for the opening scene, and we soon cannot tell anymore if the music responds to the picture or the contrary.

Kavinsky's long-awaited debut album Outrun features 13 tracks, including 8 previously unreleased and some reworks. From the first notes, we can hear Paul Hahn (manager of Daft Punk) recounting an introduction to the adventures of Kavinsky. Warm and electric, "Blizzard" makes its entrance and sets the tone before allowing "ProtoVision" to take its place, which with its nervous and synthetic melody was the first excerpt of Outrun that whas released on an EP. Then arrives "Odd Look", the first vocal song of the record, which unveils a mysterious funky voice that can remind the groove of Marvin Gaye or Prince.

It's then "Rampage"‘s turn to take us with its menacing orchestral atmosphere like in Dragon Ball Z ; after what comes the persuasive beat of Suburbia on which notorious Havoc from Mobb Deep lent his voice. The upgraded version of "Testarossa Autodrive" confirms the efficacity of this unstoppable melody, and it's at this point we find "Nightcall" again, the famous ballad produced by Guy-Manuel from Daft Punk and featuring Lovefoxxx from CSS.

"Dead Cruiser" arrives then, muscled yet melancholic, followed by "Grand Canyon" which takes us with its electrical ritournelle. The voice of Tyson, the funk revelation from UK, transformed the instrumental "First Blood" into a génuine hit. The rythmic and melodious Roadgame leads us to Endless, which gently closes this long-awaited revealing first opus, with as a conclusion a narrated epilogue by Paul Hahn again... — (via Artist, Bandcamp)

—

Kavinsky's "Nightcall" is almost as synonymous with Drive as Ryan Gosling. The French musician's new album isn't linked to a film, but centers around an automotive story of Kavinsky's creation, and replicates the soundtracks to 1980s driving video games with eerie accuracy.

French electronic musician Kavinsky knows something about what makes a great action movie soundtrack: His song "Nightcall" is as synonymous with Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive as scorpion jackets and hot pink brush fonts. While it was written and released before Drive was filmed, the song's perfect placement in the film, and the recognition that it brought Kavinsky's way, seem to have inspired him to replicate it. His new album Outrun isn't attached to a picture, but it's meant to tell the story of a lovelorn young man in the mid-1980s who, through some magical auto accident, becomes some sort of zombie man/car hybrid... who makes electronic music.

The details of Kavinsky's intended narrative are blurry, and possibly nonsensical, but he succeeds in making an album that suggests that it's the soundtrack to something, and at least making it clear that it has to do with cars and the 1980s. Its title was taken from the 1986 Sega driving game of the same name (which puts the player in control of a Ferrari Testarossa). There's also a depressingly uninspired rap by Havoc from Mobb Deep that uses the word "car" dozens of times, as well as the presence of "Nightcall", which seems to have been included here because, why not?

But Kavinsky doesn't need words, or even his close association with Drive, to project an automobile air: Outrun is littered with musical allusions to speed. "Testarossa Overdrive", with its arpeggios, slow-motion chord changes, and a lead synth pitched somewhere between a wailing guitar solo and a wailing sax solo, provokes synesthetic flashbacks to bygone games of F-Zero. A childhood's worth of low-budget VHS action movies has trained my brain to interpret the ominous piano and digitally emulated strings on "Rampage" as cues for a shadowy stalker type driving the city streets at night in search of prey.

Where Outrun unambiguously excels is in inducing a severe case of nostalgia in media consumers of a certain age. There's something in Kavinsky's evocation of 1986 that affects a primal part of my psyche. It took me a while to figure out that it has its finger right on the exact time where video games and movies taught me to lose myself in screens for days at a time. — (via Pitchfork)

↓
Label: Record Makers
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Gatefold
Released: 2013
Genre: Electronic
Style: Electro, Downtempo

File under: Electronic // Synthesiser
⦿