Blogarhythms

If you’ve been paying attention to my rantings here you know I love UK-based Alt-Dance quintet Hot Chip already. But what you might not have any real inkling of is exactly why I love them. Well fret champ, all will be revealed.

In 2005 the band’s debut full-length Coming on Strong bridged the gap between the drum-machine Funk of artists like Prince, Stevie Wonder, Shuggie Otis and Sly Stone, the glitzy but tightly-programmed R&B of Timbaland and R. Kelly, the icy Synthpop of Depeche Mode, the pure Pop of the Beach Boys and assorted House, IDM, Electro, Hip-Hop and Soft-Rock. Admittedly, I wasn’t aware that these were artists or genres that needed amalgamating until I actually heard the record, but everything went together so perfectly, and the boys accomplished this musical alchemy with so much tongue-in-cheek humor and deadpan seriousness that it all made sense, and I fell in love.

Their 2006 sophomore effort The Warning took the band, and all it’s influences, on a trip to the club; hinting at all the same points of musical reference while amping up the dance beats, dipping deeper into the well of proto-Electronica, riffing harder on ’80s Electropop acts like the Eurythmics, Pet Shop Boys and Erasure, and adding a lot more guitar to the mix. More importantly, their songwriting got a lot less surreal, and a lot more cohesive. And all this was accomplished amidst the release of countless EPs, b-sides, and remixes for what seemed like every artist, and every genre imaginable, on the planet!

Oh, and they were unfailingly dope every time I saw them live too. So how could they not be my favorite band ever?

Next Tuesday (Monday in the UK) sees the release of the group’s third full-length, a 13 track romp titled Made in the Dark, which doesn’t disappoint the fan in me in the least. Unsurprisingly, the band is still up to it’s old Synthpop tricks (as evidenced by the first official single “Ready for the Floor”), if less prominently. They still love them some Prince (see “Bendable Posable” which finds Joe back on the mic with his sing-songy rhyming) as well as R. Kelly’s (”We’re Looking for a Lot of Love”) brand of R&B. Making people dance (”Touch Too Much,” “Hold On”) is still a priority. And they haven’t lost their sense of humor (peep “Wrestlers”) either.

Hot Chip’s “Bendable Posable”

Some things are different though. As promised in interviews, Made in the Dark features even more guitar than any previous album, though it stops short of being the “Rock” album it was made out to be. If anything, the whole thing is just way more “proggy” than the band’s erlier efforts, with the New Wave, Synthpop and Dance styles the band is known for coated here (as heard on the Todd Rundgren-sampling “Shake a Fist”) in a harder-edged Prog-Rock and Krautrock-influenced shell. I don’t think the band has ever recorded a piano-fueled ballad before either, yet there are three of them on Made in the Dark.

Personally I can’t wait to hear how the new material works in live setting when the band embarks on their US tour in April.

-El Keter