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Hot Chip - Coming On Strong (moshi Moshi)
Music is a funny thing. Not funny ha ha, but funny... strange. It never ceases to amaze me what a bizarre effect listening to music can have on some people, especially on a dance floor, especially after six pints of export strength larger (...thank you for drinking responsibly!).The thing is you can never remember just how ridiculous it's possible for you to look dancing whilst pissed. Minus a few thousand brain cells and a coherent grasp of the previous night's events, you can only imagine what your drunken rug cutting might have looked like to any innocent bystanders.
I imagine that the way I dance drunkenly to anything is the same way I dance sober to 'Down With Prince', the first single from Hot Chip's debut album 'Coming On Strong'. If you're wondering, that's awkwardly and with as much coordination as a bat deprived of its ears. That's not because I can't dance mind, it's because I haven't got a clue how to dance to this kind of music. Even so, dance I must because 'Down With Prince' and 'Coming On Strong' are both absolutely class.
Honestly though, trying to describe what this album sounds like asks some pretty serious questions about my journalistic abilities or the apparent lack thereof, so I'm not even going to attempt to, not really. But take Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor at their word when they tell you that 'you've never seen this type of shit before now' and that they're 'making records sounding like they're smoking crack now'. They're not just blowing smoke up your arse 'now', not even crack pipe smoke. Baby they for real.
The opening track 'Take Care', for instance, is a pretty sombre affair but the quirky plodding of wibbly wobbly bass lines and synths is as characteristic an introduction to the world of Hot Chip as you're going to get. The next couple of tracks 'The Beach Party' and 'Keep Fallin'' are certainly more upbeat if no more energetic in their execution. The whole album in fact is as infectiously laid back as a zombie on a sun lounger. It's as if innovation comes naturally to these kids and if the results weren't quite so appealing it'd be easy to hate Hot Chip for being the smug bastards they clearly are.
In spite of their inventive misuse of beats and rhymes the duo never fail to conjure up some sublime melodies and some genuinely atmospheric sound scapes. 'Crap Kraft Dinner', for instance, builds from a simple click house drumbeat into a soaring near seven minute epic about heartache and, er..., poor home cooking. Plus it has to have the best soft core porn saxophone accompaniment I've ever heard. And that's no small achievement when you imagine how I spend most of my evenings.
After listening to the whole meandering musical smorgasbord that is 'Coming On Strong', 'Bad Luck' and 'Baby Said' stand out as the most accessible tracks on the album. That's not to say that they're bland or commercial, they're just a bit more conventional, if the term even applies. Still I doubt you're likely to hear either in the top 40 this Sunday or indeed any Sunday. Not with lyrics like 'f*ck you, you f*cking f*ck' and 'you dance like you've got an unenviable case of ring sting'. I just can't see it happening. Which is a shame, because this is exactly the type of thing we've all been missing out on; home grown musical talent that is genuinely trying to create something different. I've no idea what it is, but I like it.
Rest assured that whatever these boys are up to it's absorbing from the moment you press play. And If you can't get your head around the scattered beats and the clicks and the insanely catchy off beat melodies straight away, don't worry, give it a week and you'll be singing along to tunes you would've sworn didn't even make sense the first time round. It's clever like that, and that's probably why it's ultimately so rewarding. Like trying to put a square peg into a round hole with a rubber mallet, it's not normal, it shouldn't work but one way or the other it does.
Jonathan Kay
Moshi Moshi Music
Hot Chip
Written: 5th Jul, 04
Read: 2728 times
