(astralwerks)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
The breakthrough album and sophomore release of London's electro-indie heroes Hot Chip takes on the Sex Pistols-like theory of the studio album reconfigured as greatest hits package. Apart from a couple of meandering ballads toward the back end, it contains almost nothing but modern classics of its genre. It's an assured, loving quantum leap forward from Coming on Strong, and while Made in the Dark and One Life Stand were destined to refine its rough-and-ready beatmaking and daydream romance respectively, The Warning remains their most defiant and frankly delightful statement of purpose. The superficial difference it takes on compared to their earlier recordings is obviously its slickness and surplus of energetic hook-ridden pop songs, but the more telling element it carries forward is its eccentric, slightly unsettled quality: the ghost in the machine fully drowns out the antiseptic tones of keyboards and manufactured beats.
At the outset, however, "Careful" makes clear that there is no shyness here about electronic sound; it opens in a bath of the stuff before bursting into several minutes of fresh, strange chaos. The Warning is destined to end just as weirdly, with the so-called hidden track "Won't Wash," a music-box creation with unnerving tones, chords and anti-rhythms. And along the way, there are detours that wouldn't sound out of place on the two adjacent records in their keen taste for jokes and musical grotesquerie. "The Warning" itself lives up to its paranoid, tight groove with a series of gently sung threats and hip hop-derived braggadocio; "Tchaparian" is a rhythmically tricky stage for some of secondary vocalist Joe Goddard's most well-placed singing; and then, of course, there's the robotic vocoder noise on "So Glad to See You." None of these ideas would've felt beyond the pale on Coming on Strong or the early EPs even if they're more polished here, despite the fact that one of them gives the record its title.
Hot Chip seem to realize, though, that their deepest gifts lie elsewhere, and that emotion, fun and intricacy needn't all be mutually exclusive. "Look After Me" is a quintessential Hot Chip ballad in pure terms of its composition, sensitive and fucked, but it almost thoroughly tosses obvious electronics out the window in favor of woodblocks and a gentle guitar performance, which is one way to grab attention. "Colours" has more to prove, melding its lilting, twitching sweetness and open-hearted melody (and hook) with classic Big Beat. Hot Chip's best songs from this day forward would all be variations on this melding of sensibilities; for now, they still find time for pure unadulterated bangers in the form of two instant classics. "Over and Over" is a monster of a modern-rock slam groove fused with hip hop, wickedly witty kitchen-sink imagery ("monkey with a miniature cymbal," for all you Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders fans) and eventually a spelling bee. "(Just Like We) Breakdown," a Dead or Alive-like circular celebration of body and spirit that rather bizarrely was never a single, is as irresistible as alternative rock gets, and is more unabashed about its pursuit of pleasure than is typically permitted for anything branded "indie."
That probably includes "Boy from School," but there is little point in deriding Hot Chip's signature track (competing perhaps with "One Pure Thought") and one of the loveliest dance songs of the century for not being entirely at peace with its own mad syncopation. The song tells a story of alienation and the parading small devastations of growing up, but it tells it musically and structurally, as its relentless, driving beat gives way to an entire final section built on the repeated, haunting statement "I got lost / you said this was the way back" before eventually fading into the ether. In five minutes this travels to the moon and back with considerable drama like the greatest disco 12" mixes, but does so with an obvious personal stamp and sense of sullen mystery that make it hard to define, completely fascinating and unexpectedly touching.
"No Fit State" isn't quite as good -- you can only ask for so many masterpieces on a single record -- but it's thrillingly close, and subscribes to the same outmoded idea of an epic build, a climax and a denouement; like "Boy from School," it asserts the dominance of its killer hook from the very first seconds it bursts into the room and rattles everybody, here even more beholden to disco thanks to its liberal use of the synthesizer as orchestra. There is no thought to minimalism or reduction; Hot Chip have arrived at their maximalist phase, and they rise right up to it -- especially at the finale, which brings in every facet of their modest genius with its wall of exchanged vocals between Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard, with Goddard's hypnotic repetition of the title phrase and Taylor's regretful assertion of its meaning. The song leaves you so breathless by the end that the entrance of the hidden track almost feels like a violation. So much about The Warning is pure pleasure, but it's only fitting -- given its evocation of dark-night secrets throughout and the open intimidation against the listener's life and well-being on the title track -- that it chooses not to make the conveying of such pleasure its defining gesture.
No comments:
Post a Comment