If you would have told me back in 2004 that there'd come a time in the not so distant future where I'd be grumpily moaning about how Alan Braxe and Fred Falke's "Rubicon" had a lot to answer for, I'd have called you a crazy, fun-hating nut. Alas, as proof that too much of anything can make a man go sour, here I am, in 2007, feeling pretty much that exact way about cokey French electro-house, the 80s, and goddamn it, even arpeggios. To be fair, I'm not sure that anyone could have predicted a sudden, abundant upswing in fake cop show theme electro over the last three years-- not to the extent that we got it, anyway-- but I guess that's what happens when you spend too much time as a culture fixating on "Grand Theft Auto", "Miami Vice", and the relative merits of Giorgio Moroder.
Thankfully, we're in the hangover stage of that particular long weekend, which means that not only is France's Kavinsky at the wrong party, he's late to it. The followup EP to 2006's Teddy Boy, 1986 is at once indebted to Braxe's early work and yet somehow utterly impervious to it. As pure homage goes, Kavinsky's sounds are dead on, his structures work, his chord changes feel right, but, ultimately, there's no blood here. It's how most miniature movements end, really; eventually something comes along that has all the on-paper characteristics of the original thing and absolutely none of its joy. This is that.
In what I guess is meant to be a cute thematic quirk, 1986 is a mini sorta-concept EP about...driving. With its comic book depiction of a drug cartel-type wearing a racing jacket and driver's gloves, the album artwork hints at the video game-reinforcing theme. Those who bother to dig deeper into the "back story" will be thumped over the nose with a silly tale about how 1986 was the year Kavinsky crashed his Ferrari Testarossa, only to come back as a zombie hell bent on...what, it never says. Haunting a dead horse?
That all the song titles sound like driving games doesn't help to disabuse us of the notion that Kavinsky made most of these tracks in between serious face time with his PS2. There's "Wayfarer", "Grand Canyon", "Dead Cruiser", the pointlessly expository "Flashback" (which advances the car crash storyline with a 90-second skit featuring news reports, police sirens, and what sounds like a lost soundtrack to a body magic fitness tape) and, just for good measure, a SebastiAn remix of 2006's "Testarossa Overdrive". With the possible exception of "Grand Canyon", which has a nice shimmer to it, none of them feel particularly essential; what they might do is make you pine a bit for the days when Braxe and Vitalic and Daft Punk were doing this sort of thing with style. A craven attempt to dine out on the last remaining scraps of appeal for this particular strand of French house, 1986 is a bloodless miss; less Jan Hammer, more nail in the coffin.
