Did Adverts Rip Off Bands, Or Was It The Other Way Round?

Right now, Beach House are sitting in their poxy flat in Baltimore, looking at a big pile of principles, wondering which ones are edible. A few months back, the chilltastic dream-pop duo refused to license one of their songs, "Take Care" to VW for a commercial. Fair enough. But then a funny thing happened. Rather than start their song hunt all over again, VW just ripped off the track – got some in-house band of professional copyists to wodge together their own version, something just-similar-enough-but-not-too-similar. Something a lot like this:

Hmm. From the chiming, looping two-note guitar riff, to the 'is it a man-person or is it a lady-person?' breathy vocal, it's pretty clear where they're going with this. I mean, check out the original:

But, the sad fact is that the automotive industry got there first anyway when it comes to ambient evocative alt-pop. Long before Beach House were a twinkle in the genre's eye, there was already chillwave. It's just that nobody called it that. They called it "incidental music from car ads". Here are five of my favourite examples of incidental music from car ads that unwittingly fit the genre perfectly.

TOYOTA CAMRY

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me get off on the new Perfume Genius record. Ringing unembellished piano chords tracing a gilded road to nowhere – neither resolving nor changing, just circling in one endless loop of chill. All it needs is someone moaning torturous non-sequiturs over it in a quivering falsetto and you've got chilly-wavey gold.

Notice how, in this very similar clip, Perfume Genius has also gone for the "memories" trope so beloved by car advertisments. Conversely, all he needs is a product shot of a Citroen Xsara Picasso at the end, and it'd be perfect.

Closest Cousin: Perfume Genius
Chill Out Of Ten: 9 Hammocks. TOYOTA COROLLA

Wonderfully ambient chilling on t'wave here. The writers have remembered that the second golden rule of CW is to be globalist in your pop-pilfering approach: to remember that no one likes someone who doesn't know who Omar Souleyman is. So they've added a cute 'lil funk-deluxe middle-eastern riff, to complement their observance of to the first golden rule: lots of ambient synths going nowhere slowly.

Closest Cousin: Toro Y Moi
Chill Out Of Ten: 8 Hammocks. MAZDA

Mazda used a simple, sparse snare a far-off rumble of bass, and a high twinkling guitar line sending you to chill amongst the stars as you dreamily contemplate "Whether the people who built your car are just another behemoth carmaker, or whether they think a little differently."

Closest Cousin: Chairlift
Chill Out Of Ten: 7 Hammocks. SKODA

More glo-wave than pure chill wavers– notice the deliberately cheap and tinny electronica that could be Lemonade, or even Teengirl Fantasy. The neo-Balkan riff that creeps in around the 40 second mark once again talks to chillwave's essentially globalist blogocentric ethno-techno connectivity credo. After all, in the court of the chilling wave, there is no 'us' and no 'them'.

Closest Cousin: Teengirl Fantasy
Chill Out Of Ten: 6 Hammocks. AUDI

Notice how the synths have a blocky, loosely-shaped sensibility that Kindness has made all his own, and the very same sense of a mindlessly banged-out riff being constantly recycled way past the point of reason.

Closest Cousin: Kindness
Chill Out Of Ten: 6 Hammocks.