The first song to be previewed from Hot Chip’s forthcoming album In Our Heads was a whistle-stop (quasi-pun, I’m afraid) tour around the world in seven minutes. The first single, ”Night And Day“, is not. Instead, it’s a slice of bouncy disco that wouldn’t look out of place amongst Joe Goddard’s record collection. There’s an elastic bassline, a helium-voiced chorus that recalls the Bee Gees (or, if you’re a little young, Scissor Sisters). Neat production tricks abound, from the odd squelch in between phrases, to the knowingly shadowy vocal fills at the end of the verses.
It’s less of an instant earworm than previous Hot Chip lead singles (“Ready For The Floor” and “Made In The Dark”), but I fear it’s going to work its way into my brain before long—even if it’s just the deadpan bridge with its black-humour couplets telling us to “Quit your jibber jabber”.
Back when I was at school, the guy alphabetically proximate to me in class was into a lot of teenage emo and pop-punk. Think Fall Out Boy, Green Day, I don’t even want to remember the names of the others—he’s already going to hate me for saying this. Anyway, he went to university, switched things round a bit, and now puts the name of MiniCritch (named in honour of our old Latin teacher) to his music, which veers between caustic house and the glitchy brand of reggaeton known as ‘Moombahton’. You should definitely check his stuff out.
His latest track is “Doctor Black” (see above), which rides along a seriously fat ground bass line and has frenetic lead synths that syncopate with the four-to-the-floor beat. There are also some comedy cut-up vocal samples, which give the whole thing, like the rest of MiniCritch’s stuff, an endearingly DIY feel. Near the end, a highly-resonant line kicks in an octave up, before the track cuts out like a dying robot.
Be sure to watch out for his next move: he drops new tracks and remixes whenever he’s busy being pedagogical.
The more time I spend with M83′s recent double-album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, the more I understand its place in the history of progressive music. By eschewing the shoegaze structures that characterised their breakthrough album, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, the band has managed to weld together the perfect kind of lengthy, wandering album. There were hints of the pop ethic on their previous full-length, Saturdays = Youth, but this time round the choruses are bigger, the vocals clearer, and the studious techno marathons reduced to interstitial passages.
If you’re looking for the album’s clear antecedent, it’s got to be Pink Floyd’s The Wall, released in 1979, which was a sprawling opus of tangled emotions and paranoia, but also, crucially, had a fair few easily-strummable hits that were then dressed up in ceremonially progressive garb. Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is an awful lot more triumphant than The Wall, and it’s not convoluted by even the sketchiest of narrative conceits. All the same, the parallels are plain to see. Continue reading →
The big news first: there’s a new Hot Chip album coming in June, and you can’t even believe how excited I am about that. In Your Heads drops in via Domino Records, and it’s going to have a hard job matching, let alone topping, the brilliance of One Life Stand. I praised that album’s lush pop sensibility, and the way it introduced old-fashioned romance to high-tech electro.
Hot Chip have matured into a bit of a national treasure: they write solid songs that are impeccably produced, and then tour them to within an inch of their lives, reinventing the arrangements every night. I think In Your Heads is going to be Mk. II of the Hot Chip lover’s Hot Chip album.
The band’s sudden burst of productivity has not been limited to the core unit, however. There have been spin-off acts aplenty, the most publicised of which is The 2 Bears (Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard and his mate Raf Rundell, dressed up in comedy furry bear outfits, making big-tent dance music). Now there is also New Build, which features Al Doyle (vest-wearing, bespectacled, also moonlighted in LCD Soundsystem) and Felix Martin (messes around with drum machines and synths at the back of the stage). They used to be called Lanark; they’ve spent five years making the album that will be called Yesterday Was Lived & Lost.
Judging by songs like “Mercy” (see above) and “Finding Reasons“, New Build manage to be both icier and more tropical than Hot Chip. The synth pads have a crystallised sheen that screams 1980s art gallery opening, and the pair’s vocals are detached and aloof; on the other hand, loose-limbed percussion runs amok, and Doyle’s scratchy electric guitar jumps up throughout. It all sounds rather promising—like the love-child of Tom Tom Club and Yazoo.
Hot Chip’s In Your Heads is released on 11th June, on Domino Records. New Build’s Yesterday Was Lived & Lost is released on 5th March, on Lanark.
To mark the end of their time as residents on the EMI/Parlophone roster, Goldfrapp have elided their finest singles into a neat collection with typically gorgeous artwork (Mat Maitland at Big Active gave me an early love of graphic design) and two new compositions.
It’s a fine body of work which encourages listeners to not only reappraise the combo’s most radio-friendly material, but also seek out deeper cuts which might have been released as singles in a parallel, more sophisticated universe. It’s inevitable, with a collection like this, to notice the absences, but concision makes the collection all the more elegantly sequenced.
“Elegant is an appropriate word to describe Goldfrapp”
Elegant is an appropriate word to describe Goldfrapp. Even at their most sexually charged (see “Strict Machine“, from 2003′s Black Cherry), there is a quaint naïveté to the music and the lyrics which is at odds with their image. The prevailing mood of 2005′s Supernature, from the artwork downwards, was intended to be sleazy, but its standout songs (the ubiquitous “Ooh La La” which opens this compilation, and the dominating “Ride A White Horse“) quickly trade smut for euphoria. That album also featured two quasi-ballads, “Let It Take You”(see below) and “Time Out From The World“, both beatless and stratospheric, and rich in emotional baggage. At their zenith, Goldfrapp appeared to have beamed in from a very different place.
“Seventh Tree repositioned them in the mode of Beck circa Sea Change: acoustic and woody in timbre, and tepid in dynamics”
The duo then took quite an about turn in their career, eschewing the disco ball of Supernature and Black Cherry, and the alpine, noirish cabaret of their debut, Felt Mountain. 2008′s Seventh Tree repositioned them in the mode of Beck circa Sea Change. Acoustic and woody in timbre, and tepid in dynamics, the singles from this era don’t stick in the mind so much, but their mid-table position in this new compilation allows you to enjoy the very particular sonic details that made it, in aggregate, a rather bleak and tired affair. It’s a pity they never released the best song on the album, “Cologne Cerrone Houdini” (see below), which harks back to the age of soul with its orchestral flourishes and squelchy keys. The song is airy and helium-powered, in stark contrast to the songs which surrounded it.
“Head First was an exercise in cheap 1980s neon retreads”
The final act in the Goldfrapp/EMI partnership was the most sorrowful. Where Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory once created the Ur-sounds that would be replicated by others (Madonna’s Confessions On A Dance Floor was reputedly inspired by Supernature), 2010′s Head First was an exercise in cheap 1980s neon retreads. Alas, below the head-rush, it was limb-less.
Goldfrapp’s falling star tendencies might lead the listener to imagine this compilation as a parting shot. It doesn’t help that the new songs sound elegiac and stately, and that they close out the track-listing. (They are both, however, lovely: “Yellow Halo” softly pulsates through French touch and blog house, sounding a bit like Friendly Fires and Cut Copy; “Melancholy Sky” (see top of article) is lounge-y and evokes comparisons with the duo’s Felt Mountain sound.) But Goldfrapp are nothing if not determined. Currently at work on their sixth album, Will and Alison remain a creative partnership to be written off at one’s peril. So let’s hope The Singles proves not to be a swansong, but the closing of a chapter in the career of a duo who are often overlooked but never underrepresented in their impact on popular music.
I guess my being rooted to this side of the Atlantic meant that Junior Boys never “happened” for me. The English equivalent of their sleek, refined electro-soul was Hot Chip, and then Hot Chip went ADHD, and then they matured into something (whisper it) superior to the Canadian twosome.
But “Parallel Lines”, which is the opener to their 2009 album Begone Dull Care, is just too porcelain-perfect to ignore.
Hot Chip know their way around the tragicomic, which is why “Crap Kraft Dinner” is a different kind of loser’s anthem.
The song doesn’t operate in terms of verse-chorus-verse-chorus, and if it did, it wouldn’t work. The first bit is all purported scene-setting, making the listener believe it’s the guy who’s been dumped. Over melancholy FM bells and the occasional, soothing throb of bass, Alexis Taylor sounds like a down-and-out, glued to the bar stool.
“All you can hear is my refusal,
‘Cos I haven’t got the time for a jerk-off loser.”
But then, as the song enters its second act, the tempo steps up a gear. A lonely, forlorn strum of guitar is another faux amis before the song’s true intentions are laid bare. The 808 starts hitting on the off-beat, second vocalist Joe Goddard copies Taylor’s lyrics but an octave lower, and we realise that it’s the girl, previously the recipient of the titular “crap Kraft dinner”, who’s been dumped. Before you know it, with an ironic smirk, a saxophone straight out of “Careless Whisper” enters the scene, presaging the song’s final section, wherein competing synth lines rotate and murmur over a tricksier beat. Now he’s not so much singing about leaving his girl, as rubbing salt in her wounds, pretending he’s upset and heartbroken in spite of it being his decision. There’s “no more space or time / For a last supper”—though, given his previously explicated culinary skills, maybe that’s no bad thing.
The double irony is, of course, that Hot Chip know they’re geeks, and know that they’re never really the ones doing the dumping, or the salt-rubbing, or the pimping of one’s ride. After all, in another Coming On Strong cut, “Playboy”, Goddard describes “Drivin’ in my Peugeot / 20-inch rims with the chrome now / Blazin’ out Yo La Tengo”, like a particularly sad-sack gangsta from Putney.
I suppose it takes a certain kind of musician to turn their back on critical acclaim, much of which has applauded you for bringing DFA-style grooves to the outskirts of the M25, and decide instead to make an album that’s intended to sound like the work of a polished 1990s boy band.
Well, Friendly Fires have done just that, making their second album, Pala, a sometimes frustrating listen for older fans of the band—though it isn’t likely to hurt the St. Albans trio’s commercial prospects. Continue reading →
Sounding like a cross between “Night Fever” and the Knight Rider theme tune, the lead single for the forthcoming Gorillaz album, Plastic Beach, is a seriously catchy slice of music. “Stylo”, as it is titled, is also a star-studded affair, boasting some fairly unhinged wailing from a chap called Bobby Womack, and a rap at the end that appears to be telephoned in by Mos Def. And, despite my rather cynical tone, I rather like it.
Damon Albarn treads very gently over “Stylo”. Yes, the first verse is occupied by his wistful mumblings, but beyond that, it really sounds nothing like any of his previous work. It doesn’t even resemble a Gorillaz song. Entirely synthetic in its instrumentation, “Stylo” is a one-idea song that’s probably as addictive as crystal meth, and, let’s hope, not too representative of the album as a whole. Much as I’m enjoying it, I refuse to believe Albarn would seriously contemplate making a whole album of similar material – more likely, “Stylo” is a palate cleanser before Plastic Beach makes its entrance, replete with substantially more weirdness.
I say all this, and then I hear Bobby Womack literally crawling through my speakers with his deranged intrusions, and I think this song is utterly brilliant and terrifying at the same time.
The band’s sudden burst of productivity has not been limited to the core unit, however. There have been spin-off acts aplenty, the most publicised of which is 
It’s a fine body of work which encourages listeners to not only reappraise the combo’s most radio-friendly material, but also seek out deeper cuts which might have been released as singles in a parallel, more sophisticated universe. It’s inevitable, with a collection like this, to notice the absences, but concision makes the collection all the more elegantly sequenced.
I suppose it takes a certain kind of musician to turn their back on critical acclaim, much of which has applauded you for bringing DFA-style grooves to the outskirts of the M25, and decide instead to make an album that’s intended to sound like the work of a polished 1990s boy band.
