Kids and the Hall
Dave Jaffer
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Chromeo: Making sure the magic remains
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Chromeo cap remarkable year with new album and advice from one of their idols
The country code for Sweden is 49. I discover this Jeopardy! tidbit when I phone up Chromeo's Patrick "P-Thugg" Gemayel who, along with his partner in crime Dave 1, was in the land of a million blondes to perform at the Arvika Festival. Prior to that the Montreal electro-funk duo was in Barcelona, right around the time La Furia Roja won the World Cup."We were right in the middle of the mayhem," Gemayel recalls. "We watched the game on a screen outside somewhere on the street. As soon as they marked the last point, a couple of minutes into overtime, people just lost it."
Kind of like when the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup in 1993, in Gemayel's hometown?
"It was way more tame than that," he says, recalling the destruction and the burning cop cars of 17 years ago. "They're way more respectful of their surroundings."
Gemayel is an interesting conversationalist. He's soft-spoken and pauses often inside of his long, thoughtful sentences, ostensibly to ensure he chooses the right word (which he always does). You can tell he's a talker, but not a gabber, and while he definitely knows how to elaborate he seems loath to waste a word. It's like he's conscious of exactly how long or short a response should be.
Chromeo are somewhat similar. Since arriving on the scene with She's in Control in 2004, they've been a crowd favourite hither and yon due to their ability to suss out what a crowd wants or needs, and then delivering. And while it would be unfair to label their music populist,
there's no denying that Chromeo put a premium on making music for people to, first and foremost, enjoy. Cases in point, below.The "It Would Be Unfair to Label Chromeo's Music Populist" Argument:
"Our music is very reference-based," says Gemayel. Some of our songs are more accessible for just pure listening pleasure, but a lot of our stuff is reference-based, so if you don't get our whole world - the Hall & Oates, the Rick James, the funk, the hip-hop references - if you don't get this at the same time, I can see it being a bit hard to get into.
"Like, most of my family doesn't understand what I do at all."
The "Chromeo Make Music for People to Enjoy" Argument:
"We're trying to push it musically without being pretentious or losing the fun aspect of it. If you push yourself too much musically, you just end up doing free-jazz solos everywhere. It's not what somebody wants to hear in the club, or in the car before going to the club."
This second thought emerged while discussing Chromeo's new album, Business Casual, which drops on Sept. 14. Gemayel allows that it's "not that different from [2007's] Fancy Footwork," but that when it is, its newness is representative of the duo trying to write in a different way.
"There's a bit more work on chord progressions [and] vocal arrangements, which makes a side of the record a bit more classic rock-ish," he says. "On a couple of songs on the record we changed our approach a little bit, and [made] something work on piano and vocals before even producing the song, to see if the song can sustain itself with just a piano playing and a melody on top of it."
Business Casual was also invariably influenced by time the duo spent with one of their heroes: Daryl Hall. Two years ago, Chromeo made an appearance on Hall's web series "Live from Daryl's House." Earlier this year, Hall joined them on stage at Bonnaroo and together they delivered one of the most talked-about sets of the entire festival.
Gemayel's voice gets a bit more gleeful and childlike when he talks about the time he and Dave 1 spent with Hall.
"It's rewarding to feel that connection to somebody you look up to so much, and actually sit down with them and talk about your experiences, their experiences, how they were perceived back then just like we're perceived now," he says. "[Conversations about] getting a bit of flak from mixing too many different styles or, you know, being a bit tongue-in-cheek, or people wondering if [the music is] serious or not - they had the same problems.
"I think what surprised me more from this whole experience, doing the web show and playing Bonnaroo, is that I still have that magic even after hanging out with him and after spending a lot of time with him. I still have that magic."
Chromeo
w/ Holy Ghost! and Telephoned
@ Capital Music Hall, Aug. 2
