DOU B L E DOWN After a decade of fine-tuning their craft,electro-pop duo Chromeo open up their process to collaborators and double down on their commitment to ’80s R&B.
by Jeff D. Min photography by Timothy Saccenti
It’s Cinco de Mayo, and Chromeo is gearing up for their set at Lincoln Hall. It’s uncharacteristically cool for May, but business as usual for a place like Chicago.The sun is playing hide-and-seek, periodically jutting through clouds in unpredictable spurts—the wind vicious and ripe. Chromeo is in town for the Come Alive Tour promoting their newest album, White Women . Their set is exactly what you’d expect from the Canadian electro-funk, synth- pop duo: large, opulent sounds, a disco inferno of lights, and a thick lacquer of Soul Glo covering everything within earshot.They are bold and charismatic, and drive forward doggedly like a dry-slab avalanche. At one juncture, guitarist and vocalist Dave 1 pauses and says something to the effect of how intimate a show this is and how they haven’t performed like this since they were rocking the stage with guys like Flosstradamus and the Cool Kids. But before nostalgia could settle in and anchor the experience, he and synth man P-Thugg exploded back into their set like a supersonic jet at takeoff. For as fantastic as Chromeo is onstage, their formula is actually pretty simple: commitment, a commitment to friendship, a commitment to craft, and a commitment to artistic integrity. It’s a marriage that goes beyond the allure of fame and into the past when Dave 1 and P-Thugg were just David Macklovitch and Patrick Gemayel. Friendship and an obsessive love for music formed their cornerstone, and for ten years, it’s given them a stable foundation to build upon. Musicians like Hall & Oates, Rick James, and Phil Collins inspired them every step of the way. “Our friendship is the bedrock of this band,” explains Macklovitch. “We became friends by discovering funk music together when we were fifteen.Twenty years later, the bond is still intact: total trust, devotion to one another, and solidarity. And a shared admiration for this kind of music.” Chromeo is something of a family affair—by blood and by proxy. David’s brother A-Trak (Fool’s Gold), along with early supporter Tiga (Turbo Recordings), offered trusted counsel, steeped in credibility and experience. Their guidance helped Chromeo coagulate their sound and build something that could be translated onstage. When asked about those early shows, Gemayel offers a telling response,“Years of empty rooms and uncomfortable sound checks full of microphone feedbacks. But [those] early years had the merit of letting us build a solid fan base and cred. They probably even forced us to get our presentation tightened up and extremely aware of how we could be viewed and interpreted.” The easy thing to do would have been to label them a throwback, and when you’re wrangling with such an iconic sound, it’s bound to happen. But it’s clear that it’s much more than that.It’s a profound respect and admiration for what came before. “The Black ’80s were completely overlooked in the 2000s’electro revival of artists like New Order, Joy Division, and the Smiths,” says Gemayel.“They were regarded as high-brow music, but Mtume, Cameo, Midnight Star, and Rick James were ridiculed and considered a farce, which to us was shocking. It was borderline racist.”
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