“Chase the Night” – Work Drugs
Recycling the slick grooves of the late ’70s and early ’80s through 21st-century digital noodling has given birth to an entire (sort of) genre which has in recent years been as cutting-edge hip in pop music circles as the original music had been deemed hopelessly passé for a good 20 years or more. Funny that.
But there’s no denying the allure of this stuff, and “Chase the Night” strikes me just about as irresistible as chillwave comes. Equal parts sultry beat and soaring melody, the song transcends the genre’s robotic drift via some canny songwriting chops: both the verse and the chorus have two distinct sections, the second in each case building on the first in subtle but ear-grabbing ways. In the case of the verse, the melody changes from ascending to descending at the midway point and now comes at us in double time (0:30); the chorus, meanwhile, likewise goes double-time about halfway through, adding a lower-register counter-melody (1:03) after opening more anthemically.
And the boys of Work Drugs aren’t done there. We get a short, foggy bridge that floats near a kind of vocal manipulation that tips its hat towards commercial pop, but fades as quickly and curiously as it arose, and then leads into the song’s last two, disarming sections: first (2:35), the chorus, now presented in a new, minimal setting that accentuates the appeal of both the melody and of the human voices singing it; second (2:55), an out-of-the-blue, honest-to-goodness guitar solo, which sounds beautifully in context even as it was the last thing I might have expected. (Repeat listens to the song have since revealed a guitar hiding in plain sight in the back of the mix in the chorus, but without the closing solo, I’d never have picked it out.)
Work Drugs is the bizarrely prolific Philadelphia-based duo of Thomas Crystal and Ben Louisiana. They have been recording since 2011, and their forthcoming album, Louisa, will be their seventh full-length. I’m not even sure how that happens. The band performs live as a five-piece. “Chase the Night” is from Louisa, and can be downloaded as an MP3 in the usual method, above, or you can visit the band’s SoundCloud page and grab it there as a higher-definition .wav file. Lots of other songs available there as well. Thanks to the band for the MP3.
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