Something Different: Night Drive - Position I (EP) (September 3, 2013)

Night Drive is a modern-day synth-pop duo that understudies for New Wave giants The Human League, with a twist of Duran Duran and maybe some Depeche Mode during those three minutes scattered throughout the group’s career where they experienced some form of joy. It’s made up of Rodney Connell and Brandon Duhon, hailing from Austin and Houston, Texas, respectively, and their music is marketed as “inspired by sci-fi cinematic landscapes… that explores the darker currents of abstract emotion”. While that sounds like a bunch of bullshit buzzwords thrown together at the last minute by a publicist that really needed to submit some copy to a local alternative newspaper in order to promote an upcoming club show, it is fairly accurate, mining similar territory as acts such as Digitalism or Crystal Castles, whom I've had to stop listening to because of Ethan Kath’s (allegedly) rapey ways.I'm telling you, separating the art from the artists is getting more and more difficult in the current culture.

It does seem like Night Drive likes fucking with people, given that PR blurb above, along with the fact that they’ve given interviews where they claim they met and decided to form a band after the woman that both were dating at the same time (without knowing about one another) unexpectedly passed away. This is all very silly (and a blatant lie, not unlike Kool Keith telling a reporter that he was once committed to Bellevue Hospital because he was bored and wanted to amuse himself), which tracks, as they preferred for the focus to be on their musical output anyway.

Between the two, Connell handles the lyrics and vocals, while Duhon primarily works on the musical aspects, but both men have priors in the music game, having been a part of separate bands that have since broken up, freeing the two to work together. Curiously, given how much Austin likes to cling to its weirdness and its live music scene, Night Drive hardly ever play there, even though that’s where Connell still lives. The band practices and produces in H-Town, which is definitely not a city known for its burgeoning synth-pop New Wave revivalists (although it does have a nightclub, #s, which is amazing and should be deemed a motherfucking historical landmark, and if any of you two have actually been there, I'd like to hear about your experiences), and they tour all over the country while still maintaining day jobs. Undeterred by the ever-changing musical landscapes that seem to ebb and flow in popularity with each passing moment, the duo simply keeps their heads low and plugs away at their craft.

To date, Night Drive has released multiple singles, most of which have been collected and compiled onto their self-titled full-length debut, released in 2017, and the subject of today’s post, the Position I EP, which hit digital store shelves in late summer 2013. Over the course of its five tracks, Night Drive quickly set up their narrative as another entry into the category of “synth-pop from people who may not have been old enough to fully appreciate New Wave when it was dominant, but found the time to research the genre because, unlike what a lot of the kids seem to do these days, some people like learning about the history of a chosen genre and don’t just accept the piffle presented to them on the radio”, a sentence that really got away from me there, but fuck it, I’m leaving it in, because it had to be said (no it didn’t). So without further ado, New Wave Lives presents Night Drive's Position I.

(Note: Night Drive’s Bandcamp page for Position I features the following tracks in a different order than they appear on Spotify. I have no idea why. That's the tracklisting I'm going with, though, so if you'd like to listen along, the world is yours.)

1. DRONES

Position I kicks off like a rush of blood onto the dance floor after you’ve impaled your leg on an exposed nail. Oh, does that only apply to the sketchy clubs I frequent? You guys are all pussies. Anywho, the music pulses underneath mechanically, giving the listener the proper amount of remove from the lyrics, which are certainly chant-worthy, but also kind of dumb (“These drones are dead”? Okay, sure), and I mean that as a high compliment. “Drones”, because any band who specializes in sci-fi New Wave soundscapes would need to have a song called “Drones” somewhere in their catalog, is ultimately catchy as fuck, the perfect companion for a midnight journey in a vehicle of some sort (a “night drive”, as it were) or to bump the energy level up at the club instantaneously. I kind of loved this shit.

2. NO PLANS

It’s been scientifically proven that 99.99999% of all New Wave songs are about love, unrequited or otherwise, and “No Plans” falls squarely into the former category, with Connell telling a possible romantic interest that, regardless of what happens between them, he has “no plans to be alone”. The first song the duo had ever written, Night Drive lean rather heavily into the 1980’s influences on “No Plans”, a song you’ll swear you heard on the radio while growing up if you’re of a certain age, or a song you think your grandfather will really enjoy if you’re of a different certain age. It’s certainly a shift from “Drones”, but more accessible, and hey, it’s always refreshing to hear the protagonist in a song believe that they’ll be fine with or without you.

3. SEA OF LIGHT

Pounding and upbeat, if a bit of a comedown from the one-two punch of “Last Dayz” and “All We Got Iz Us” “Drones” and “No Plans” (although, if you really think about it, those Onyx song titles could also apply here). It’s more than a bit cheesy (it is called “Sea of Light”, after all), but it gets the people going, and the hook is properly anthemic in its delivery. I imagine “Sea of Light” does amazingly well at Night Drive’s live shows: once I finally go to one I’ll have to update this write-up. Not my favorite track on here, but it still sounds pretty good, and musically it could certainly hang with the other alt-indie rock you hear on the radio on a regular basis, as well as the other shit I've covered on the 80's/20's blog.

4. NOCTURNAL

“Nocturnal”, the second of two newish tracks on Position I (the first being “No Plans”), is the lone song that I don’t really listen to. The hook is corny, and the lyrics attempt to replicate the Human League’s tendency to relay banal statements with profundity (no, seriously, there are layers to lines such as “You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar / When I met you” and “Listen to the voice of Buddha / Saying stop your sericulture”). “Nocturnal” falters vocally, but if Night Drive had presented this one as an instrumental, I’d think it was hot as fuck: true to its title, it skews a bit darker than the rest of Position I and sounds like a chase sequence from an ‘80s thriller that doesn’t yet exist.

5. AFTER DARK

My favorite of the bunch, and the first Night Drive song I had ever heard, as a club deejay played it during an unbelievably stacked night filled with hot shit, and this was the song I still wanted to revisit the next day. “After Dark” is the most complete-sounding song on Position I: unsurprisingly, it was also plucked from relative obscurity to appear on the soundtrack for the movie That Awkward Moment, a flick nobody watched (the trailers sold it as a faux-Apatow man-child buddy comedy that, no thanks, I’m good) and is best known for starring, bizarrely, one-half of the most recent on-screen iteration of the Fantastic Four (Whiplash’s Miles Teller and Black Panther’s Michael B. Jordan). (“Drones” also apparently appears in the movie itself, but I cannot confirm, as I’ll never watch it.) “After Dark” is just a beautiful song: it’s a club-friendly, accessible track about young love, a musical interpretation of this exchange Deborah Foreman and Nicolas Cage have in Valley Girl:

JULIE (Foreman): Where are we going?

RANDY (Cage): I don’t care.

JULIE: What are we going to do?

RANDY: Anything.

It wears its New Wave aesthetic (and its synths) on its sleeve, but “After Dark” is purely the product of the 2010’s and deserves a much wider audience. There, I said it.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Position I is a fucking fire EP that, um, positions Night Drive as a band to watch out for. Four of its five tracks speed by with pulsating club-ready beats and lyrics that, well, they both take themselves seriously but also aren’t all that serious, if that makes any sense, unless you believe that the energy generated from unrequited love could power the United States for six months to a year, in which case you must be a teenager who stumbled upon my blog, Max So Wave-y, by accident, so welcome! And even the lone meh track, “Nocturnal”, has some energy underneath it. Connell and Duhon make up for the demise of their previous bands by creating a lane for Night Drive: New Wave for the current decade that could still exist even if New Wave ultimately hadn’t. This EP was strong enough to make me want to seek out their full-length debut almost immediately, and if you’re still reading this post, having not been turned off by the complete shift in protocol, let me know in the comments or @ me on Twitter if you honestly want to see more of this kind of shit. Night Drive something something this shit was fucking great something in italics loren ipsum.

BUY OR BURN? I enjoyed the shit out of this, so it’d be cool if you threw some money Night Drive’s way. The links below and throughout take you to Amazon, but if you were to just go to the duo's Bandcamp page, I wouldn't be mad: I'd just expect you to mail me a commission check. DM me for the address.

BEST TRACKS: “After Dark”; “Drones”; “No Plans”; “Sea of Light”

-Max