Chromatics: "Running From The Sun" (2012)

Over the last few years, social media has well and truly colonised the car. Not only can we now plug our SmartPhones into our cars in any number of ways, but GPS navigation has reached such a degree of omniscience that it often seems as if a fully-formed digital topography has more or less replaced our analog streets and highways. Depictions of driving in popular visual culture haven’t lagged far behind, to the point where it’s become commonplace for film and television directors to treat windscreens as digital screens, overlaying car scenes with phone conversations and GPS instructions. However, if the car has contracted to SmartPhone and GPS devices, then those devices have also ballooned to incorporate what used to be the hermetic mindspace of the solitary driver. Cars may have become a part of digital media, but digital media has in turn internalised something of the lingering loneliness of late-night car travel. As their recent album Kill For Love reinforced, Chromatics are very much attuned to this moment, crafting driving soundtracks for solitary iPhone listening, music for driving only in the sense that Brian Eno envisaged music for airports. “Running From The Sun” is one of the longer tracks on Kill For Love, and its lyrics are suffused with the restless sense of the road that weaves togethers Chromatics’ various 80s influences – an elevation of the windscreen to an end in itself, a gathering of all arrivals and departures into some as-yet unfulfilled information horizon. Singing from the other side of that horizon, Johnny Jewel’s autotunes yearn for it in retrospect, pine for that same odd combination of arrival and departure, except that it’s strangely deflated here, more like a lack of net movement than anything else, an ambience that gradually distends into a reflexive impotence. If plugging into the network once spun you out onto some desolate, interminable highway, then Chromatics are way past the point of unplugging, way beyond the receding offramps and last exits of, say, the Junior Boys. Instead, they teach you to live through a circadian carsickness that just goes on and on, like the interminable last chords of this heartbreaking track, until you’re too numb to fully register the fleeting, final sounds of morning, of a new day dawning, of something resembling a destination.