Kavinsky - Nightcall

This time, I take a look at Kavinsky's Nightcall, otherwise known as that song from Drive.

So it's been quite the journey of 80s throwbacks over the last while.  I mean a good while too, since the days of Franz Ferdinand we've been taking a slow journey through that decade from post punk to this here tune.

Kavinsky is french and shares a degree of lineage with Daft Punk and the like and Nightcall is really not what I would consider representative of his style.  I wonder how many people have had the reaction to his album as someone who buys a metal album on the basis of a ballad and finds it's the only track like it on the album.

Speaking of the album though, it's called Outrun and holy crap is it good.  Although ostensibly french house along with Justice and Daft Punk, this owes much more to the metal of the day.  These are the kind of synth riffs you think that Randy Rhodes might play.

Which is what makes Nightcall such a curveball.  While most of Outrun is instrumental, Nightcall instead is a verse chorus verse song, mellow and icy in the way that the best of 80s pop could be.

Minor key synthriffs provide an undercurrent to a distant, vocoded singer talking about midnight phonecalls to a lost love, offering to "show you where it's dark, but have no fear"  The response of the girl, trying to find the one she's lost too provides the uplifting, hopeful melody of the chorus.

It's remarkably restrained, doubly so when you've heard the otherwise busy chaos of his past releases.  A very restricted instrument set paints out the melody in stark cold synth plucks before a sweeping pad raises the track to euphoria before dropping it down works beautifully.

The fact that it's about a ferrari driving zombie calling his lost love while out haunting the desert roads doesn't hurt either.  I'm not kidding, thats what the album's about.

Posted in: 80s, drive, eighties, kavinsky, Movie, Music, Music Review, nightcall, outrun, Review, song