lubland is full of love stories. Think of all those figures
C
shimmying in the lights, the snatched glances across the
dancefloor, spilling your heart out to a stranger who
suddenly seems like the most beautiful person you’ve ever
met, followed by the cab ride home and then — well — we’ll
close the door on this scene and let your imagination take its course. And
think about dance music itself, all those songs about love and how one
night can change your life, the beats that throb with primal passions and
then those moments where you stand, whether with your arms in the air
or a big sloppy smile across your face, as the melodies seem to whisper
promises in your ears and everything suddenly seems so right.
It’s a romantic ideal of course, and often falls apart like the plot of a Mills
and Boon novel under closer scrutiny. For just like the new love of your
life you brought home last night, that tune that seemed so perfect on the
dancefloor might appear less so in the cold light of day; boringly shallow
and with nothing to suggest that it will ever be anything more now that
the initial ardour has gone. Yet there are also tunes that you’ll remember
forever, and it’s precisely because Hot Chip understand the lows of the
morning after, as much as the highs of the night before, that the records
the London group make become something you want to share your life
with, rather than discard after a quick fling. Both fun and thoughtful,
gorgeous and yet quirkily individual, tunes like ‘Over And Over’, ‘Ready For
The Floor’ and latest release ‘One Life Stand’ are everything you could
want from pop music. Taken from their fourth album of the same name
(out 1st February on Parlophone), the sentiments of ‘One Life Stand’ –
where singer Alexis Taylor swoons through lyrics like ‘Moments keep us
guessing / and lead us from temptation / but better to embrace them /
and measure our relation’ in his sweet falsetto — seem to speak about Hot
Chip’s infatuation with clubland itself, as much as anyone they’ve met
there.
“Joe definitely has a love affair with club culture,’ says Alexis of
songwriting partner Joe Goddard, “whereas I have more of a love affair
with the idea of soul music. He represents the need for urgency and
modernity in the production, whereas I sometimes tend to push things in
a slower and more melancholy direction. If you put those two things
together then you might end up with something that seems to represent
both the ‘coming up’ and ‘coming down’ moments.”
Taken in this context, you could almost read ‘One Life Stand’ and its
immediate predecessor ‘Made In The Dark’ as two chapters in the same
love story. Released in 2008, ‘Made In The Dark’ was a wildly
unpredictable listen that swung from the lively electro-pop of ‘Ready For
The Floor’ through the decidedly odd r&b of ‘Wrestlers’ to the downbeat
balladry of ‘In The Privacy Of Our Love’: an album that was certainly
exciting to spend some time with but which — like a lot of lovers on early
dates — maybe tried a bit too hard to impress. ‘One Life Stand’, however,
feels like a calmer and more mature proposition. It’s not that the spark
has gone — moments like ‘We Have Love’ or ‘Thieves In The Night’ show
Hot Chip are still as enamoured of the dancefloor as they have ever been
— but tracks such as ‘Slush’ and ‘Alley Cats’ are much more like proper
songs which have the confidence to say how they really feel, without
retreating behind any flashy production or self-conscious eclecticism.
“We wanted to do a record that had one consistent feel throughout,”
Alexis explains. “Every album we’d done before had these stylistic leaps
from track to track and we’d always tried to make a virtue of those
differences. But with this one we talked about stripping away some of the
instrumentation so it was less busy throughout. We haven’t made a quiet
acoustic album by any means, but it is something that has more space and
clarity to it. Now the songs should jump out at you, rather than being
hidden behind a hundred musical ideas, all working against each other.”
Contrasting emotions
What this newfound space lays bare more than ever are the contrasting
emotions beating at Hot Chip’s heart. There’s always been a sorrowful
tinge to the sad-eyed refrains of songs like ‘And I Was A Boy From School’ “They’re very heartfelt records, but we’ve
from 2006’s Mercury-nominated second LP ‘The Warning’, a shade which
always had people who are wary of where
has deepened even further on the aforementioned ‘Alley Cats’, where the
band sound more fragile than ever. Yet Alexis maintains that ‘One Life we’re coming from and who sometimes miss
Stand’ is ultimately “a very hopeful and positive record” and it’s true that
the humour when it’s there and find it when
tracks like ‘Hand Me Down Your Love’, with its string section and
thumping piano, have the sort of heart-swelling power found in classic it’s not.”
pop-soul tracks such as Luther Vandross’ ‘Never Too Much’, the sort of
048
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