Kavinsky has been a name that I associated with the more grandiose and cinematic French electro ever since I started hitting those clubs back nearly a decade ago. Teddy Boy was something special.
He found much wider attention recently with Nightcall central to the soundtrack to what was to my mind the coolest film of the last twelve months, Drive. His music has always been wrapped up with the idea of speeding cars, and this was the film that brought that idea outside his beautiful 80s-influenced animated music videos and onto the big screen.
It has taken Kavinsky, or Vincent Belorgey to his friends”, seven years to come up with a full length record, but from the intro alone you could tell it was worth the wait. “Prelude” thunders its way into the record combining the thrash electro that we all loved from Justice and the electronic wizardry of Daft Punk. The epic scale of the record is there from the get-go, and as you move into Blizzard there is no let up and the introduction of a thumping 4/4 beat.
Throughout the album, there are grand arpeggios and slow-motion chord changes and synth guitar solos that may sound self-indulgent in other places, but when under Kavinsky’s control, somehow works on a record named after a vintage Sega arcade racing game from the 90s. The zombie/race movie plot that has surrounded Kavinsky from his earliest videos of a man crashing his Ferrari and returning as a coll-as-fuck electro-loving zombie doesn’t seem out of place.
He takes his foot off the pedal of afew times throughout the record to give your heart-rate a break, but even on the slower tracks like Nightcall, its all mind meltingly cool. The record is a soundtrack the one of the most glorious stylised films never made, and proof if any were needed that French electro house is the soundtrack to losing yourself to speed.
Kavinsky – OutRun is out now on Mercury Records.