Traffic Jams: Fourge - 'Accelerator (Feat. Nightlite)'
Traffic sucks, so why not start your morning off with some music? You provide the toast and we'll provide the jams.
I really can't get enough electronic music, but electronic music with a car theme just hits all the right pleasure centers in my brain. Add a neat road-inspired title and visual to the mix, like the colorful backdrop of Fourge's single "Accelerator" and you've got the most pleasurable combination of sights and sounds.
I can't make out the time of day in the album art — or is it single art? — but it looks like it could be either dawn or dusk; it works for both. All you have to do is drive! Fourge and Nightlite's 2018 single is about as perfect as any soundtrack for the road.
The track feels like it could have been released before the new millennium, which is, more or less, the point of the "retro thriller," as the artist describes it. Fourge is prone to drawing from the past; the artist often borrows bits of retrofuturism from synthwave music and the neon aesthetic of the '80s.
Think of bright purple grid lines fading on the horizon and you'll get the idea. Or, listen to another Fourge single, "Velvet 2600," to see exactly what I mean. There's pages and posts on Reddit dedicated to the vibe, namely the Outrun subreddit. But "Velvet 2600" is a downbeat jam — it's classified in the genre downtempo by music streaming services from Apple or Spotify — and has a similar sound to other Fourge singles like "Jive" and "The Adventures of Carlo."
The track featured here, on the other hand, is an upbeat ode to its namesake. If the accelerator pedal needed a universal theme song, it couldn't get that much better than "Accelerator." The song just builds and builds, like an engine climbing through a rev range as it looks for the torque shove.
The Fourge track has fewer moving parts than a combustion engine, but it has the crescendo of a throttle map. Synth layers and drum kits are led in by a soft piano with too much reverb, but the light notes give way to a pulsating beat jabbing like pistons. Put the song on and close your eyes. You can feel the flash of highway lamp posts overhead. Light. Shadow. Light. Speed up. Just pin it.