Photo – Chromatics at Wonder Ballroom September 7 2013 by Kirk Chantraine
Photos–Chromatics at Wonder Ballroom, Portland, September 7 2013
– photos by Kirk Chantraine
Chromatics played the Wonder Ballroom in Portland as part of MusicFestNW 2013.
The band’s most recent album, Kill for Love, came in #15 in the Pitchfork Readers’ Poll for best albums of 2012.
The band formed in the Pacific Northwest more than a decade ago. The group’s sound has been described as falling under the “slow, dreamy, not-always-Italian dance-pop subgenre known as Italo disco,” according to Pitchfork, which goes on (in a Kill for Love album review) to say: “As with other acts on New Jersey-based Italians Do It Better, a label co-founded by group mastermind Johnny Jewel, Chromatics didn’t just incorporate the vocoders and vintage synth arpeggios of the turn-of-the-1980s originals, they added the brittle guitars, dubby reverb, and urban dread of post-punk.”
Photos – Chromatics at Republic, Vancouver Sept 22 2011
The group received a shot in the arm publicity-wise when two Jewel-assisted tracks appeared on the soundtrack to the movie Drive. Besides Jewel, Chromatics’ other main member is vocalist Ruth Radelet.
Kill for Love is Chromatics’ first album since 2007’s Night Drive. The 90-minute album features a cover of Neil Young‘s “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)”. The band has also covered Bruce Springsteen‘s “I’m On Fire” and Kate Bush‘s “Running Up That Hill”.
More Chromatics MusicFestNW 2013 photos:
