Trying to classify Hot Chip’s music is more an exercise in convenience than accuracy.
The band treats genres as touch points while rarely committing to a single one, which creates a willfully all-over-the-place brand of dance music.
On the 2006 sophomore album “The Warning,” the English quintet began synthesizing its influences into a whole, but the success of the album rested mostly on the undeniable greatness of its singles: the repetitively euphoric ode to repetitive euphoria “Over and Over” and the sublime “Boy from School.”
Even with these, Hot Chip’s popularity mainly extended from its world-conquering live show and impressive resume on the remix circuit. For its third album, “Made in the Dark,” Hot Chip is positioned to ascend to the upper echelon of indie-dance acts, where it could rub elbows with LCD Soundsystem and Justice.
An early leak from “Made in the Dark” was live staple “Shake a Fist.” At first the song seems little more than studio tomfoolery, with the band toying with effects and sounds with mostly nonsensical lyrics. However, after several listens, the structure becomes more apparent.
The track begins as typical Hot Chip: clattering percussion and rumbling low-end balancing out the call and response vocals between Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard. At the halfway point, however, the track that has been steadily building halts entirely, as American progressive composer and Hot Chip icon Todd Rundgren interrupts with the breakdown sampled from his “The Sounds of the Studio.”
Without preparation, a blitzkrieg of pitch-shifted synths that sound like laser beams and a weightier backbeat usurp the song entirely. It’s an arresting moment when Taylor returns with the original chorus with the new, clubby track, simultaneously displaying Hot Chip’s gift with pop and prank. It also serves as evidence of Hot Chip’s obstinate refusal to streamline its approach into something more easily digestible, retaining its impulse toward sonic mischief.
Of course, it is often the assumption that good records require a sense of cohesion and consistency. But cohesion and consistency have never been words in the Hot Chip lexicon. Never content to let one idea suffice when two could be included, Hot Chip take cues from myriad sources: Soul, R&B, house, hip-hop, funk and pop all compose the genre grab bag that Hot Chip makes liberal use of.
When Hot Chip focuses its eclecticism into finding the right groove, it can be nearly unstoppable. On “Touch Too Much,” a soaring organ riff cloaks a percussive drive as Taylor provides his most moving vocal performance on the record, somehow sounding simultaneously dispassionate and aching.
The sincere and inviting “One Pure Thought” shifts between straightforward guitar riffs, a bubbling bass-line, lifting synths and electronic pings but never abandons the 4/4 stomp that holds it all together.
The most accessible of “Made in the Dark” is the ultrasmooth single “Ready for the Floor.”
The song, rumored to have been offered to Kylie Minogue, is all gliding synths, funk guitar, elastic bass and a majestic chorus, packaged in a relatively lean four minutes. It plays much more toward the “pop” aspect of the electro-pop moniker that is often associated with Hot Chip. It’s not hard to imagine Minogue’s icy voice replacing Taylor’s dispassionate falsetto, but it’s to the album’s benefit that the rumored negotiations didn’t come through.
“Ready for the Floor” is the only song as indelible as “Over and Over” or “Boy From School” and shows the heights Hot Chip can reach when it refines its ideas into a singular whole.
When a band stuffs ideas into each song until its seams are ready to burst, it’s inevitable that certain moments will fail.
“Bendable Poseable” suffocates beneath the weight of its own ambition; too many dispersed elements clutter the entire arrangement, never congealing into anything more than the sum of its parts.
On “Wrestlers,” a song consisting almost entirely of wrestling terminology, Hot Chip’s humor is too affected and forced. Moreover, the music never shows enough inventiveness or imagination to substantiate the extended wrestling conceit. It also features the embarrassingly shameless clunker, “Here we come, drop kick / Half Nelson, Full Nelson, Willy Nelson.”
“Don’t Dance” moves too quickly from section to section, never committing to a single unifying theme.
More than its previous efforts, Hot Chip tempers the relentless drive and sonic experimentation in several wistful ballads, which exhibit Taylor’s growing songwriting chops. Best among them is “We’re Looking for a Lot of Love,” which quietly unfolds with a restraint that is a welcome change of pace from “Made in the Dark’s” more dynamic tracks.
The title track plays up Hot Chip’s love of straightforward R&B, as a calm backbeat and a languorous piano punctuate the song’s plain sadness.
“Whistle for Will” and “In the Privacy of Our Love” are also both well-constructed ballads in their own right, but nestled at the end of the album, they feel too much like a compulsory comedown from the more relentless songs on the album, depriving the listener of one more infectious rave-up.
Ultimately, “Made in the Dark” isn’t Hot Chip’s great step forward, nor is it likely that it will catapult them into massive popularity. Uneven as it may be, however, it still offers a handful of incessantly addictive songs.
““ Ross Rinehart
E-mail Rinehart at rrinehart@media.ucla.edu.