Hot Chip — Night And Day

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”.

Hot Chip — Flutes

“One day you might realise / That you might need to open your eyes.”

We know a fair bit about Hot Chip‘s love of wonky, garage, and house. We know this from songs like “Don’t Dance”, “Bendable Poseable” and “We Have Love”, and we know this from Joe Goddard’s various side-projects, like The 2 Bears. On Hot Chip’s last album, One Life Stand, they sounded sometimes exhilarating, frequently lovestruck, and occasionally like they were sweatily getting down on the dancefloor. But they never conjured up all these moods at the same time.

Until now.

Our first taste of what Hot Chip in 2012 sounds like comes via “Flutes” (see above, in a head-spinning in-studio video). At once euphoric and romantic—perhaps that’s a symptom of the cheesy cut-up vocal sample, overlaid with warm analogue bass and chords—the song builds and builds, taking on new and exciting layers of vocals, synths both arpeggiated and wailing, and pulsating percussion. It’s like a carnival, walking through a renewal of one’s marital vows.

That this marathon workout never collapses or feels like it’s treading ground is evidence of Hot Chip’s maturity as songwriters, which has progressed even further since One Life Stand. On that album, they constructed sweet pop songs with interesting production and instrumentation; on “Flutes”, they’re pushing the boundaries of pop music, with a composition that travels round the world and is still back home in time for supper. The roly-poly electric piano finale is the icing on the cake.

The effect is like putting Joe Goddard’s “Gabriel“, itself a modern classic, on steroids. And it bodes super-well for the rest of the album, In Your Heads, which drops in early June.

New Build, In Your Heads

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.

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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.

Related articles

• Hot Chip sign to Domino, releasing ‘In Our Heads’ in June, plus other related news (2 Bears, New Build) (brooklynvegan.com)

Hot Chip — Ready For The Floor (Extended Version)

The most perfect four-minute pop song, distended to include an anticipatory intro which leaves you begging for that minor-to-major chord change.

Junior Boys — Parallel Lines

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.

James Blake — Love What Happened Here

For your consideration: this year’s alternative, accidentally-festive Christmas banger.
(Following 2008′s “Ready For The Floor“, which was guaranteed to make the post-turkey washing-up go faster, and 2010′s “Hannibal“.)

Hot Chip — “Crap Kraft Dinner”

“All the people I love are drunk.”

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.

Gang Gang Dance — Eye Contact

I have zero contextual knowledge of Gang Gang Dance. Here are some facts I know about Gang Gang Dance:

1. They opened for Animal Collective at their 2009 Brixton Academy gig, which I was supposed to go to, but didn’t;
2. I have, in the past, confused them for Passion Pit (reason unknown—maybe the common strand is their hyperactive vocalists?), and also Yeasayer (more easily done, given their shared membership of the worldbeat genre on Wikipedia).

Which, I suppose, means my appreciation of their newest album, Eye Contact, is totally tabula rasa. Like some of the most stunning AC moments, Eye Contact emerges from a primordial digital soup. A few painterly strokes of synth, sent from outer space. Gentle ticking of cymbals like a car cooling off on the driveway. Indecipherable, Damo Suzuki-esque chatter lurking at the back of the mix. The other reference point for “Glass Jar”, I suppose, is Tortoise’s “TNT”, which coalesces in a similar manner. Eventually the sounds take on greater form; the wisps and fragments turn into a glassy motif, and Jesse Lee’s drums do a serviceable impression of Nick Mason, in the intro to Pink Floyd’s “Time”. Then, in the final five minutes (the song is eleven minutes long), vocalist Lizzi Bougatsos steps in with her otherworldly tones, and the arrangement behind her settles into a slightly manic, trance-informed jig. “Glass Jar” is undoubtedly one of the most intense and overwhelming entry points to an album I have heard for some time.

From there on in, Eye Contact is a mesmerising. There are seven actual songs, interspersed with utterly incongruous transitional pieces. As an example, the first, “∞”, features what sounds like Orthodox Greek chanting over ambient murmurings. Its cousins, “∞∞” and “∞∞∞”, are similarly extrasensory.

Consequently, the real magic lies in the songs. Eye Contact melds South Asian melodies to sonics which alternately recall dingy clubs in Shoreditch, the tropical rainforests of Pandora, and a hunk of baile funk to boot. It’s heady stuff, and at times you’re left almost gasping for air, but, significantly, the band never lose sight of their audience, and never get stuck up their own behinds. Frequently, it sounds like what might pass for a Bollywood soundtrack in the year 3000 (imagine the nth sequel to Enthiran), or what might ensue if M.I.A. decided to embrace pop music again, rather than flirting with bursts of industrial noise. The concluding passage of “Chinese High” swaps the swampy funk of the opening part for a glossy curtain of 1980s prog, with cascades of guitar and keyboard, underpinned by Lee’s ricocheting drums. On “MindKilla”, Bougatsos’s voice is like a jet of water propelled out of a hosepipe, subtly modulating in profile as it is disturbed by external factors—in this case, the army of squelching and buzzing and cooing synthesisers.

The second half of Eye Contact is more laid-back. “Romance Layers” features a guest turn on the microphone from Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, who gives the digitally approximated slap bass and hyperactive neo-soul a lesson in soothing seduction. Like every instrument on the album, Taylor’s voice is heavily treated, rippling out into a thousand particles at the end of each phrase. The final song, “Thru and Thru”, sees Bougatsos taking on the Kate Bush role of tormented woman of the moors, ululating above a constantly shifting instrumental backdrop, which turns from a classical Indian ditty into a carnival of funk, and then into a sparser, percussion-heavy sequence. It’s bewildering, and so far into the matrix it’s probably learnt to breathe in carbon dioxide. As all the coagulating elements recede, leaving only a mournful sarod wailing into the night, it’s not hard to feel shaken by Eye Contact’s assault on the senses.

Gang Gang Dance’s fifth album won me over, bulldozing over my initial trepidation surrounding this kind of hippy cultish, one-world music. Eye Contact is compositionally accomplished, and does not abuse its delightfully methylated production to the detriment of melody and song structure. It never pushes into proggy abandon, even as it plunges into foreign climes, and it will continue to perplex and challenge me for some time yet, I foresee. I would say that a trip to the band’s back catalogue is very much in order.

Under-informed profligacy – Favourite Albums of 2010

This time last year, I bored you all to death with my fifteen favourite albums of 2009. At the time, I suggested my list was not very useful because I had spent much of the year catching up on older music thanks to Spotify.

A year on, plus ça change. A friend told me he was surprised to see Fleetwood Mac extremely high on the list of most-listened to music on Spotify. I told him I was probably the reason behind this.

Nevertheless, for (non)completists’ sake, I shall persist with this probably pointless exercise. It might give you some weird insight into my warped tastes, at least.

Because I don’t wish to look like a slacker, you can also expect me to publish a list with albums I will get round to listening to in the near future.

Hurts

Hot Chip – “Slush”;
Martin Amis – London Fields;
Blur – “No Distance Left To Run”.