Hot Chip
“You know, when they came out I was looking at these goofy guys and thinking no way they could bring it. But they brought it. Hard.” – Clarkness
“I think we'll make it our group's goal to have R. Kelly to do a version of one of our songs.” – Joe Goddard
“I like it…but it sounds like something I’d hear in an Abercrombie and Fitch.” – Dr. Phillip S. Horky
Albums Reviewed:
Hot Chip
are five nerdy-looking guys from
Hot Chip’s seeds were planted ten years ago when Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard met at the ripe old age of seventeen. Though enough band members have since joined to bring the current lineup to five nerdy-looking guys instead of just two, Alexis and Joe, for creative purposes, more or less are Hot Chip. They write all the songs, do the vast majority of the singing, and even recorded both of their first two albums in Joe’s mother’s bedroom (seriously; by the way, considering how well-produced they are, how awesome is that?). Musically, they started out as an interesting and unique if not uber-original combination of electronica, soul, pop, and ironic faux-gangsta-rap humor, but on their second album they’ve become more of a straightahead pop band, albeit with a strong electronica/house influence and further splotches of soul strewn around as well. They’re influenced by all sorts of diverse things you wouldn’t expect to find together in a band (for instance, they’re acknowledged fans of the Beach Boys, Aphex Twin, and R. Kelly. Hence, “electro-soul-pop”), and the most original thing about the band is their excellent vocals, which were more evenly split between Alexis and Joe on their first album but lean more toward Alexis on their second. The contrast of Joe’s gruff voice to Alexis’ almost self-consciously “pretty” one (of course emphasized by the fact that Joe looks like a fat, bearded lout and Alexis looks like a little pixie and wears glasses bigger than the rest of his head) really is unique and provides many fantastic moments on both of their records, even if my buddy Phil does have a point when he says they sound like something you’d hear in an Abercrombie and Fitch store. Just put on “Over and Over” and imagine its playing at a relatively low volume while an impossibly happy sales clerk comes up to you and asks “hey, wanna buy some jeans?” This doesn’t take away from the quality of the song. It’s just something worth pointing out, and I should let you know they sound completely different live than on record. Literally like a totally different band. A band that rocks so hard on their mini-synths they don’t even know how hard they rock.
Lineup! From left to right are Alexis Taylor (eating the LP), Felix Martin (indie mustache!), Owen Clarke (who Wikipedia says plays the guitar at their live show, though when I saw them live he was most definitely not playing the solo in “Over and Over”), Al “Do It” Doyle (the one who was playing the solo), and Joe Goddard. Don’t let their appearance fool you. Live, they can totally bring it.
Coming On Strong (2005)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Playboy”
Considering my first exposure to Hot Chip beyond a single or two and a chunk of The Warning playing so softly I could barely hear it in the car of my friend Clark on our way to Coachella last April was when they subsequently played at said Coachella and melted the faces of everyone cramped inside the Coachella-approved obscenely hot tent by bringing the rock hard (I drank four bottles of water during their show! And their show lasted an hour!!), the pervasive languid vibe of this one, their debut, caught me off guard. “These were the guys that kicked my ass last month? They sound like they’re asleep! What the hell?” Granted, the production on these mellow, meandering electro-soul-pop shenanigans was very strong and the little random touches everywhere showed all sorts of, you know, “tender loving care” on the part of Alexis and Joe in crafting their first ever record album, and granted it sounded pretty good in my car stereo at night and/or when I wasn’t paying all that much attention to it, but overall I wasn’t quite sure what these interesting British fellows were going for, especially since “Over and Over” was so popperrific and awesome and, you know, I wanted more of that.
The 3rd time through the album, though, I actually started paying attention to the lyrics, and it hit me: it’s funny. Not like Weird Al funny or comedy album funny, but a unique and honestly delightful kind of faux-gangsta and “little white nerdy British guy saying ‘muthafucka’ and talking about how he’s ‘down with Prince’” kind of funny. I should probably just come right out and say that if you don’t appreciate ironic humor (like, for instance, the guy playing mariachi music from his pickup truck I jokingly flashed the “RAWK!” devil horns at while my friends and I were stuck in traffic heading to the Police concert a few weeks ago who started cursing at me and stalked us for the next twenty minutes as we crawled along Alvarado at 5 mph until he got onto the freeway…he didn’t think it was funny, apparently), you won’t like this album. The music is definitely enjoyable and sounds all nice and pretty in your headphones, and the melodies, while not the kind of tight, concise pop stuff that’s all over The Warning, are nice and make themselves heard after repeated listenings, but this album wouldn’t be what it is without the tiny British guy with the huge glasses and high, melodious voice singing (earnestly!) “Give up all you suckas, we the tightest muthafuckas, and you never seen us talkin’ shit before, now!” over the light electro-soul-pop backing. Other lines in this song (“Keep Fallin’”) include: “Me and Ulysses, we like Gene and Dean Ween. We're like brothers making records who can't play things” and “When the prog hits ya, if you're feeling proggy, let it get ya in the places most others can't reach you.” And I haven’t even mentioned the copious Stevie Wonder references in it: for instance, “I’m like Stevie Wonder, but I can see things.” Somehow, the whole tone of the song and album allows Alexis and the band as a whole to get away with saying that while sounding clever and funny (the kazoo solo at the end doesn’t hurt either). You know who couldn’t get away with that? Fred Durst.
To further emphasize the pseudo-faux-ironic gangsta thing these guys have going, other song titles include “Playboy,” “You Ride, We Ride, in My Ride,” and “Shining Escalade.” “Playboy” in particular has the fantastic chorus “Drivin' in my Peugeot hey-ay, hey-ay; 20 inch rims with the chrome now hey-ay, hey-ay; Blazin' out Yo La Tengo hey-ay, hey-ay; Drivin' round Putney with the top down hey-ay, hey-ay,” this time sung by the “gravelly” (by comparison) baritone of Joe, and emphasized superbly by some kind of circus synth line on crack. As I mentioned in the intro, the contrast between their two voices is the one musical ingredient that’s unequivocally theirs and not indebted to or influenced by someone else, and it really is fantastic, especially when they’re spouting lyrics like those I’ve already copied and pasted from the first lyrics site that came up when I googled “Hot Chip lyrics” that subtly mock rap clichés that I hate and that suck.
Thus far, even though I’ve made passing allusions to the music being generally “good,” I’ll admit I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time quoting lyrics that make these guys sound quite possibly like dicks, and perhaps you think my own dickish qualities make me enjoy it more than you would. First of all, this kind of ironic joking doesn’t make it seem like the band members dislike the stuff they’re making fun of at all. On the contrary, to me it sounds like they honestly do enjoy it (plus I’ve read a bunch of their interviews, and they most certainly do) and either a) recognize the ridiculousness inherent in many of its lyrical motifs or b) recognize the ridiculousness inherent in a bunch of guys who look like them and play music that sounds like this singing about those motifs (or c) both), and this makes the album really enjoyable in a kind of goofy, fun, silly way rather than a mean-spiritedly ironic way. Second, the music really is very good. Like I said before, it’s not a “pop” album like the The Warning is, but I’m still gonna call it “pop” music, even though you’ll find it in the electronica section (where you’ll also find The Warning, which is more than a little silly considering that it contains some of the best pop songs of 2006). It’s slow and languid in general, yes, but not without a bit of hop in its step…it’s fun, you see. Despite the fact that this is nominally an electronica band and their live set-up consists of five dudes playing synths, much of the album actually sounds relatively organic. Between the varied and wonderfully-produced keyboard tones, little percussion embellishments, barely-there guitar parts, and above all the wonderful, contrasting vocals of Alexis and Joe, this may be an ironically funny electronica band…but it’s an ironically funny electronica band with heart. They completely do away with the irony on the last few tracks, for instance, and Alexis and Joe almost sound better when they’re being sincere about something (“Will you bring or fake a smile?” from the closing “One One One” is particularly nice).
So yes, a
very good and relatively unique debut album here, if mostly uniform in tone and
execution. I should also let you know
that I have the “
The Warning (2006)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Over And
Over”
A big step forward from Coming on Strong in terms of the potential of the type of material the band’s working with, but not so big a step forward in quality I feel comfortable busting out the 9 just yet. Whereas Coming on Strong was an odd, languid, ironically funny and unique electro-soul-pop album, The Warning, despite being written by what is nominally an electronica band, is a Pop album with a capital P. The production is detailed and clever and the lyrics are interesting and equally funny and affecting and you can tell the band is often trying to be “artistic” and all that stuff (plus there’s the fact that they put the confusing, almost self-consciously disjointed house raver “Careful” right at the start of the album…aren’t you supposed to start with, you know, the big hit single?), but a careful listen to the structure of everything going on here will reveal to you the fact that The Warning is just a classic pop album with modern ironic British indie electronica-soul trappings. If you throw out the haphazard mishmash of an opener (which I enjoy, but I’m not gonna sit here and argue it’s all that “catchy,” plus it’s kind of annoying when the drum machine completely loses the beat as if it’s actually Peter Criss at the end), you’ll realize the three big “single” type songs come 1-2-3 right in a row (“And There Was a Boy from School,” “Colours,” “Over and Over”), with the ballad stuck in the middle of two more upbeat poppier ones. The middle of the record gives you a bit of a lull before the token soft, sensitive ballad (“Look After Me”), and the band tucks their seemingly funny, seemingly-novelty-but-not-really song (the title track) in around the three-quarter mark, and even finishes with the token awesome album-closing chant-along splurge (“No Fit State”; and no, the bonus track doesn’t count). So again, though you may find this album in the “electronica” section of your local record store (where I found it at Amoeba), and though the band’s live lineup looks like what one British online mag called “a malfunctioning Kraftwerk” (i.e. five nerdy-looking shlubs with tiny synths in semi-circle), Hot Chip, with The Warning, has made a pure, unabashed pop album.
Fortunately, it’s frequently (though not always) a great one. The 1-2-3 punch I mentioned in the previous paragraph, for instance, are all superlative songs and fully deserve their obvious pop album placement in the running order. “And I Was a Boy from School” is built on a hypnotic, swirling keyboard line and Alexis’ gorgeous, even delicate vocals. The harmonies in the chorus (“We try…but we don’t belong…”) in particular are outstanding. “Colours” doesn’t start out as all that much and musically is deceptively simple, but it’s totally the melody (and, again, Alexis’ superb vocals) that gets you. It’s a familiar trick on this record to take a nifty, melodic phrase or verse and repeat it about 20 times a-la “Hey Jude” as if to say “Look, this is a pop album! Here’s our pop melody! Now we’re gonna sing it enough times you’ll damn well remember it and hum it walking down the street!” Weirdly enough, the two times this is most obvious (“Colours” and “No Fit State”) are the times it works the best. You feel like you could just float on listening to Alexis sing “I’m everything a girl could need…there’s nothing in this heart but me…if everything you want is free…” (as you could have probably guessed by now, this album is mostly free of ironic, “cheeky” humor, and the silly faux-gangsta stuff that was all over Coming on Strong has been completely excised). There are even bird-chirping sounds at the end! Good times. And “Over and Over” might be the best pure pop song I’ve yet heard from 2006. Hearing Alexis tell us “I’ll give you laid back” over one of the most infectiously bouncy grooves and melodies of the year is more than a little awesome, but for me it’s really the guitar solo that does it, while the band’s self-conscious lyrics on “the joy of repetition” (you know, because it’s a pop album full of repetition!) are, again, clever. I just love when clever bands put their cleverness to use by making really fun and enjoyable yet smart music. “Over and Over” is so stupidly fun you almost feel like a dunce listening to it, but it’s also smart, and that, my friends, is good stuff.
Except for the token album-closing chant-along splurge, the rest of the album slides by in a perfectly good and enjoyable yet not outstanding way. They’ve got the house-type stuff (“(Just Like We) Breakdown”), the energy-filled live ass-kicker that didn’t translate quite as well to record because they mixed the atonal sax sample way too high and the five guys aren’t jumping around like idiots the entire time (“Arrest Yourself”…it’s still pretty cool, though), the song I look at and for the life of me can’t remember how it goes even though I know I like it every time it’s playing (“So Glad to See You”), etc. The song from this section that tends to get feted more than the rest is the ballad “Look After Me,” but to me, while yeah, it’s all purty and stuff, it’s just wayyy too straightforward, and the strings don’t fit the tone of the album at all (though who knows, maybe that’s the point; all pop albums have the random ballad that doesn’t really fit 2/3 of the way through, don’t they? And they’re so self-consciously making a standard pop album here (right down to commenting on “the joy of repetition” in the lead single happy pop singalong awesome track) that, if you take it as just as self-conscious as the rest of the album, maybe it works in that way; again, who knows). My personal favorite when tossing out the big three at the start and the splurge at the end is the title track, which would actually sound a lot like something from Coming on Strong if not for the hyper, stuttering drum pattern. I just dig the contrast of Alexis’ pseudo-speak-singing delivery of lines like “I’m a mechanical music man and I’m starting a fire” to Joe’s almost chant-like chorus of “Hot Chip will break your legs, snap of your head. Hot Chip will put you down, under the ground.” Also dig how this “warning” comes during the most laid-back music of the entire album outside of the entirety of “Look After Me,” and don’t forget the out-of-nowhere short house breakdown in the middle that makes no sense within the song yet makes perfect sense within the album. Smart guys, these Brits.
The closing “No Fit State” is probably the perfect live song for five dorky British dudes jumping up and down on their mini-synths. The “Hey Jude”-esque (OK, not really at all, and it’s downright ridiculous that I’ve mentioned that song twice in this review now, but to what else should I compare a 2-3 minute song-closing chant that never changes?) of “we’re in no fit state, we’re in no fit shape…” is the definition of hypnotic, and I’ll give credit to the boys for both a) the overdubbed lines, like “to fall in love with you,” etc., and b) how the song keeps building on itself during the chant section and isn’t content just to chant for a few minutes and end (like the interesting chord changes, and the new synth line that gets louder and louder until it yanks the song back to whence it came). I know I’ve been saying it “over and over” in this review, but just allow me one more time: these guys are smart.
Supposedly the dudes have another album in the works as we speak, and I believe they either have signed or are preparing to sign for EMI, so things are definitely looking up for Hot Chip and their clever, indie electro-soul-pop. This makes me happy. They seem like good guys and they officially tore me a new asshole at Coachella, so more power to them. Hopefully by the time their next album comes out more than one or two of my friends know will who they are.
Made In The Dark (2008)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Ready For
The Floor”
An album that’s been getting uniformly strong reviews across the board (or got them when it came out months ago…I am so on time with my updates now that I’m in grad school!) because Hot Chip are finally starting to blow up and play bigger stages in better time slots at festivals and get featured reviews in magazines and get their single played on Indie 103.1 in L.A. every day (and who told you people?) and so they’re the new hotness now and therefore their new album has to get a really positive review. As it is, I think it’s Hot Chip’s weakest album to date. Don’t get me wrong, though…I certainly like the album and think it’s worthy of your listening time. I just don’t find it as focused and tight as Coming on Strong or as catchy and well-written as The Warning. There’s most definitely a lot of stuff here, but what it all adds up to is often something I question. It has its techno tracks and its ballad tracks and its funny tracks and its catchy pop tracks and that’s all well and good, but I can’t say “it’s an X album” like I could say Coming on Strong was “an ironically funny faux-gangsta electronic-soul-pop album” or The Warning was “a pop album that happens to be by an electronic band.” And sure, the first of those descriptions is incredibly odd and non-concise and the second doesn’t really tell you anything, but the fact remains that I could type them and apply them to the album in question as a whole and they were accurate statements. I can’t say something like that about this one.
And sure, maybe that means you say “Hey! It’s diverse, then! I like diverse!” And perhaps you’d be right. But I’ve always been of the opinion that “diverse” is best when you can tell that there’s some sort of unifying concept of what the album’s supposed to be behind it. I don’t sense that here. I sense a lot of stuff, a lot of which sounds pretty damn good, but a fair amount of which could certainly have been edited and tightened up a bit too. What that ends up meaning a lot of the time is that the “electronic” part of Hot Chip is more at the forefront on Made in the Dark than on either of the band’s previous two albums, and a lot of the songs are extremely busy techno/house jams with so much going on they cease to be danceable. The music here is interesting, but in a “wow, they certainly have a lot going on this song, don’t they?” way, and not a “wow, I love how this song is so concise and catchy despite all the stuff going on in it!” way. To some degree, “Shake a Fist” (complete with random Todd Rundgren sample halfway through), “Bendable Poseable,” “Touch too Much,” “Hold On,” and “Don’t Dance” all have these issues. They’re extremely busy and have lots of percussion doohickies and whatnot going on, but somewhere along the line Hot Chip stopped the process of turning these admittedly cool techno vamps into pop songs and just added more techno layers to them instead, including adding layers that make the “dance” song in question (like I said before) utterly undanceable (“Bendable Poseable” is the worst offender here, though I still objectively like the song I suppose; it’s just odd). Really, all this rambling criticism boils down to the fact that I like catchy pop songs, and a lot of this album seems to reject the “catchy pop song” approach in favor of being tricky, weird, layered, and in the end a bit less satisfying.
Thankfully, we have “Ready for the Floor” to remind us of the songs on The Warning that got me all in a lather. It doesn’t even have verses! It’s literally like two lines repeated ad nauseam, but it’s so sickeningly catchy that I dare you to listen to it once and not be humming it for weeks. I especially dig how Joe’s subtle “number one…number one guy…” parts contrast beautifully with Alexis’ main “instead of carving up the wall…why don’t you open up we’ll talk…” parts. It’s actually the only moment where the two voices work against each other in the way I’ve talked about so much on this page that I dig so much. The fact that the musical basis of the song is a simple series of super-catchy synth riffs doesn’t hurt either (sometimes less busy is better, you know?). I’m also a big fan of both the total repetitive house tune “One Pure Thought” and the opening “Out at the Pictures,” the latter of which manages to combine the busy, “what the fuck, let’s toss this in too!” vibe of much of the album with, you know, a catchy pop melody. It’s probably the most well-constructed song here. “Ready for the Floor” is the one every review cites as a huge highlight, though, and I’m not gonna be any different. Everyone likes a catchy tune.
Perhaps the oddest thing about this record is that, despite the heavier, thicker, and odder nature of most of the hard electronic stuff, the ballad side of this band comes out stronger here than on Coming on Strong even. And the thing is that the ballads are simple, soul-tinged, and very good. It’s like this album is bipolar. How do “Bendable Poseable” and “We’re Looking for a lot of Love” end up on the same album? And how do they end up coming right after one after another on the same album? I dunno! But they do. The title track is probably my 3rd-favorite song here (after “Ready for the Floor” and “Out at the Pictures”), but it barely even exists! It’s so quiet and slow and simple, but so pretty, you know? And it comes sandwiched between “Touch too Much” and “One Pure Thought.” And yes, this is probably a good thing (I’m not a fan of the Tattoo You sequencing method, remember), but it still calls direct attention to the fact that this record as a whole makes no sense The last two tracks are ballads as well, and they’re both slow, simple, and extremely pretty. “In the Privacy of our Love” is just lovely. Good stuff.
The only song I haven’t mentioned so far is “Wrestlers,” which I love because it talks about professional wrestling in the same ironic yet celebratory way that the entirety of Coming on Strong talked about gangsta rap. “Here we come, drop kick, half-nelson, full nelson, Willie Nelson…Willie Nelson.” Ha! Good times. Plenty of good material on this record, see. The whole product, though, is just scattershot. It’s less than the sum of its parts. Plus, it only really grabs my crotch and yanks twice (“Out at the Pictures” and “Ready for the Floor”). A performance from the DVD that comes with the CD really sums up how I feel about the album. It’s a 2-song sequence taken from some outdoor festival where they play “Shake a Fist” before segueing into “And I Was a Boy from School” from The Warning. The first one is nice and good, and the guys are banging on bongos and working up a serious techno-percussive lather, and the chant they get going is pretty great (as I’ve told you, from all the available evidence Hot Chip live destroys Hot Chip on CD), but once the synths segue into the chords from “Boy From School” and Alexis comes in with the first line…well, that’s it. There’s just no comparison. The reason? The melody! Everyone loves a catchy song. Three albums have also made it abundantly clear to me that “catchy pop song that happens to be electronic” is what Hot Chip is best at. This album, despite all the nice busy electronica and lovely balladry and the funny song about wrestling, only really has one of these. “Ready for the Floor” really does kick, though.