Hot Chip, One Life Stand

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Connor Moloney

One of the more lamentable schisms within the music industry is that which attaches istelf to the “difficult third album.” The reasons for the pressure associated with this otherwise completely arbitrary addition to a band’s canon are mainly down to the machinations of the industry itself.

By album three, any act who has survived the first two is usually at a point where they have gained enough notoriety that mainstream success appears to be just one final push away. Come album three, it’s time to hit the big time.

As long time festival favourites, and having quietly gotten a fair few radio hits under their belts, elecro pop mainstays Hot Chip now find themselves at the stage in their career where record company suits and some more success obsessed rock journos start referring to them as “contenders.” And lo and behold, after the well recieved and respectable selling The Warning and Made In The Dark , comes album number three. Time to move from the midday to the headline slots boys. And, of course, there are a few tried and tested tricks for making that leap:

Step One: Sanitise. Smooth out any rough edges. Once the purveyors of joyous yet unashmedly quirky pop, One Life Stand finds Hot Chip rid the clinky percussions and kitchen sink instrumentation from their template for a cleaner, yet ultimately drier sound.

Co-vocalist Alexis Taylor’s McCartneyesque falsetto has long been one the band’s greatest strengths, but on opening brace Thieves In The Night and Hand Me Down Your Love he seems to have to have taken it too far, and become bent on turning the band into some sort of electro pop Wings. This tendency towards schmaltz is nothing new for the band, but on previous albums it was offset by the blissful sense of fun that their penhant for indiosyncratic intrumentation brought. Shorn of this element, Hot Chip sound oddly soulless.

Step Two: Think Big. Make songs that sound like they should be coming from oversized stadium PA systems. There is certainly a tendency towards the more anthemic and overblown on this record, something which suits Taylor much more than his more dour co-vocalist Joe Goddard, which might explain the backseat he appears to take on much of this album.

When he does take the wheel, he provides some of the more interesting moments on the album, such as the atmospherically downbeat Keep Quiet or the quixotic Alley Cats. His voice remains a presence thoughout, but the heavy lifting looks to be being increasingly left to Taylor’s richer falsetto. If the band persist in this direction, you sense Goddard will have to get used to being more of a passenger.

Step Three: Bring the hits. Having always had an instinct for a winning tune, this is where you’d expect Hot Chip to be vikings, and admittedly they make a good fist of it. Every track here is emminently hummable, with the trance like Take It In and We Have Love particular standouts.

Best of all is perhaps I Feel Better, where the looped strings and falsetto refrain bring to mind nothing so much as a mid-nineties school disco anthem, yet the tune is so masterfully crafted that this stops being a bad thing. That being said, it should be worrying for the group have nothing here that even comes close to the immediacy of previous career highs such as Over And Over or And I Was A Boy From School.

One Life Stand is by no means a disaster, and there is enough here to keep the fans coming back for album four. It is however, Hot Chip’s worst album, something which shouldn’t please the band, the record company or the critics. In seeking to take themselves to that mythical next level, they seem to have forgotten what made them a great band in the first place. Their previous sense of abandonment, their playfulness and willingness to experiment all appear to have been lost in a record which, frankly, doesn’t sound like it was much fun to make. They needn’t have made it this difficult for themselves.

Drop-d Rating: 5\10

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Filed under: featured, records

Tags: Alexis Taylor, Alley Cats, And I Was A Boy From School, Hand Me Down Your Love, Hot Chip, I Feel Better, Joe Goddard, Keep Quiet, Made In The Dark, One Life Stand, Over And Over, Take It In, The Warning, Thieves In The Night, We Have Love