Hot Chip drops hot dance album

By Kelsey Whipple

Published Feb. 5, 2008

Three years ago, the five bespectacled Brits who make up Hot Chip were more like a Clark Kentuplet than the electro-punk Supermen they are now. Since their original spin, the geek wonders have made the kind of music that makes both perfect sense and no sense. It’s all recycled rave beats, club-meets-classroom pretension and nerdy knob twiddling — what Urkel might have created with a synth and some old Prince tapes. But perhaps that’s what makes their chronically cavalier brand of dance-rock work: If they can dance to it, you can.

On Made in the Dark, all the pieces of powerhouse dance-punk are here, heavy hints of hip-hop and afro-beat funneled into pure, fat-free dance beats in constant flux between overwhelming and understated — because even the hardcore need chill time. No ‘80s dance hook is wasted; it’s only recycled and later reinvented. The album is many things at once — Casio-rock meets boys’ choir meets broken-down disco — and all of them are in oversupply.

Early standout “Shake A Fist” marks the return of the oversized synth-and-sampler to the band’s lexicon. With a melody interplayed between head think tank Alexis Taylor’s she-vocals and his bandmates’ heavier ones, the five-minute tizzy finds Hot Chip at its most dynamic — a little too gay, a little too loud and way too catchy. Taylor’s voice — what is usually incorrectly described as a falsetto, though it verges on Scissor Sisters — is the linchpin.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from Made in the Dark, it hits hard at 1:53. Give a man a sample, and he’ll twiddle for hours. Give a man a studio, and you get “Shake A Fist.” The musical good-cop-bad-cop effect is injected two minutes in with what the band dubs “sounds of the studio,” machine gun bullets of noise punctuated by the occasional absurd squawk, your eardrums be damned.

Save for some of their overhype, songs like these have established Hot Chip as a fresh-faced version of its technorati peers — less spot-the-sample than it is count-the-hooks. The album’s first single, “Ready for the Floor,” has them in abundance, each one in the right proportion at the right time. The track betrays the band’s friendship with LCD Soundsystem, its rhymes driven into listeners’ short-term memories by Hot Chip’s trademark use of lyrical repetition (hook) layered over indefatigable rhythm (line) and copious amounts of found sounds (sinker). The best part, and the axiom of what is dance music, is that it’s all on repeat.

What the guys lack in traditional musicianship is overshadowed by catchy arrangements and a gloriously unsubtle penchant for genre-dodging. “Made in the Dark,” underpinned by genuine “my baby left me” self-pity, is as close to a ballad as the electro-savants get, a far cry from the glorified R. Kelly leftover “Wrestlers.” With lyrics like, “It’s me versus you in love/We’ll tag team, double up,” “Wrestlers” is one “wichu, baby” from being trapped in the closet and one Willie Nelson short of the album’s total. There isn’t one genre here; there are 20.

Elsewhere, “Touch Too Much” offers a stunning lesson in moderation, à la “And I Was a Boy from School.” In contrast to the six-minute lyrical absurdity of “Hold On” (“I’m only going to heaven if it tastes like caramel”), “Touch Too Much” is a slow-boiler — as initially delicate as it is subsequently frenetic. If you still need proof, this is it: When it comes to club music, Hot Chip can out-joke, out-twiddle and ultimately out-play the best of them. Nerds have never had it so good.