Synth Single Review: “Drive Tonight” by Louvers

by Karl Magi

Louvers’ “Drive Tonight” calls out with memory and uncertainty as a twilight glow suffuses everything and tentative tapping creates distant motion. Expanding synth pulses support tangled skeins of guitar as it drifts. Melancholy sounds glimmer like stars just coming out while the rhythm guides. Painful memory emanates from David Rodberg’s voice, his distinctive delivery as emotional as ever.

Notes glow like phosphorescent street lights and sharper edges slice gruffly from the guitar. Echoing vocals mingle with the diaphanous guitar and its metallic sheen before David Rodberg and John Disalvo support one another in the chorus. Urgent energy pours from guitar tones as a melodic pattern cries out on Rob Casey’s ascendant synth, like city lights fading on the horizon. David Rodberg’s rough-edged guitar creates impressions of a rumbling motor while the striding underlayer moves forward with confidence.

Having “never learned what your heart is for,” a disco ball spins above a “blue dance floor” as everything is about to break away for the narrator. “Ripples spread on a glassy pond,” and it’s familiar, but it’s been a long time. As the song’s subject asks him to “take the wheel again,” he doesn’t think he can drive tonight because it has been “so many years since I had control.” The leather of his driving gloves cracks as he puts them on, “asking me to make it real again.” He concludes, “I don’t think I can drive tonight, baby take the wheel.”