Hot Chip, Not Cold Fish

Hot Chip are back with a new album. Reining in their quirky side, they’ve created a coherent record full of glorious, euphoric synth-pop. Not bad for a bunch of nerds … Electronic Beats' Paul Sullivan caught up with the band to ask them a few questions before their appearance at the up and coming Electronic Beats Festival in Prague.

Hot Chip are nerds. Geeks. A quintet of white coat-wearing eggheads who lollop around in their ‘lab’ all day concocting intellectual pop and quirky electronic chimeras. At least that’s the way the music media seem to have portrayed them since they (presumably) ‘goofballed’ onto the scene with 2004’s (alleged) ‘dorkfest’ Coming On Strong.

True there was something a bit nerdy – or at least self-conscious – about the way their debut weaved elements of hip hop, soul, thug-pop and electro into a winking, knowing neon tapestry. And it’s true, too, that the band seemed to deliberately position themselves slightly above (or more accurately to the left of) the media’s relentless cool-o-meter, adopting an impenetrable mien that suggested equal amounts of sincerity and satire.

But nerd and geek are slangonyms for less disparaging words like brainy and technically-minded – adjectives that are liberally applied to any current dance music artist who still has more than one brain cell left to rub together. And Hot Chip are nothing if not an unashamedly bright bunch of chaps.

Nerds or not, Hot Chip have spent the last few years perfecting their kitschy sonic compounds, and along the way have gradually replaced some of their earlier tendencies to lampoon with a more warm-hearted, sincere approach. 2006’s The Warning and 2008’s Made In The Dark both spawned crucial, sound-defining smashes for the band like the zany ‘Over and Over’, the jerky ‘Ready For The Floor’, and the oddball ‘The Warning’ – but these were balanced by heartfelt hits like “‘The Boy From School’” and an increasing number of ballads and slower, more sensitive tracks.

Thus positioned somewhere between the languid discofunk of Junior Boys and the more boisterous genre-blending of Basement Jaxx, the five-some embarked in 2008 on an intensive Made In The Dark world tour, after which they took some much needed time off. Alexis became a parent during this hiatus and it wasn’t until later in 2009 that they huddled back in the studio – alongside drummer Charles Hayward from This Heat and Camberwell Now, Leo Taylor, drummer from London-based band The Invisible and the Trinidadian steel pan player Fimber Bravo – to create a fourth album, One Life Stand.

“Our last gig was over a year ago, in January 2009,” says the band’s frequently topless band member Al Doyle. “So, yeah, we’ve been away a little while but not as long as Oasis or anything [light snigger]. We were all happy to take a break for a while. It had been a busy year. Alexis had a baby and a few of us had side projects going on, but it felt good to be back in the rehearsal studio. It reminded me how much fun it is to be playing together. It was pretty good to get some steel pans going …”

Said steel timpani can be heard at various points throughout the album, but are put to particularly effective use on lead single ‘One Life Stand’ – a coruscating club thumper that matches an infectious synthesized backdrop to Alexis Taylor’s soulboy croons. “I only wanna be your one life stand / tell me do you stand by your whole man?” he sings, blithely undermining dance culture’s unwritten manifesto of sexual abandon with a song about the virtues of long-term commitment. How very, very Hot Chip.

This single’s subject matter, the album title itself, and the fact that Alexis is now a papa has led some to declare the band’s fourth outing as the inevitable ‘grown up’ offering. It’s true that One Life Stand lacks some of the ‘krayzee’ edge of its predecessors, but it’s hardly a pipe and slippers affair.
Take the opening quartet of tunes: the pounding beats and brimming disco bleeps of ‘Thieves in the Night’, with its ‘Fade To Grey’-esque melodic breakdown, the plangent piano and punchy drums of ‘Hand Me Down Your Love’, the sawing strings / soaring synths of ‘I Feel Better’; the afore-mentioned title track, all of which kick like speed-fuelled mules with the requisite euphoric choruses, catchy synth-pop sheen and Taylor’s distinctive falsetto.

“People said the same thing about Made In The Dark as well,” laughs Al, referring to the album’s supposedly ‘mature’ sound. “It’s true that Alexis having a daughter has affected him as much as any new parent, but we don’t really think about it too much in the studio. We didn’t think: “Right, we’re going to make our mature record now”, but it was one of our aims to see if we could make a proper studio album that has some unity. I think the reason it did come out more coherent or ‘all of a piece’ is simply down to the band leaving the songwriting to Joe and Alexis whereas before we always had some kind of input from the whole band. Also, it was all recorded in eight weeks during April and May last year, which probably lends the album a certain space.”
It may also have something to do with the fact that Hot Chip used an outside professional studio for the first time. The bulk of the tracking on The Warning and Made In The Dark was created in Joe’s bedrooms (on pro equipment), but One Life Stand was created in Al and Felix’s East London Lanark Studio, and was strangely aided by a minor disaster in a neighbouring kebab shop.

“We had a bit of a catastrophe as we share one wall of our studio space with a kebab shop next door,” explains Al. “They had been pouring fat down the sink and the pipes burst, pouring rotting, fatty kebab water under the wall. It flooded the whole studio. It was a total nightmare. No kit got damaged, thankfully, but we had to rebuild it from the floor up. By April last year we pretty much had a brand new studio, rebuilt to our specific tastes. Which actually helped, as did the fact it all came from a deeply traumatic place ...”

One Life Stand dips mood-wise with the more sombre ‘Brothers’ and the remarkable ‘Slush’, a heartfelt 6/8 rhythm & blues ballad that could have been written by The Righteous Brothers or even Elvis. Taylor’s elegant falsetto sails soulfully over the Memphis-style tune, mingling effectively with Joe’s deeper vocals. While not generally shy of ballads – Made in the Dark had four – this could be the band’s bravest yet.

“The album is hopefully more narrative overall,” says Doyle. “We wanted it to be full of songs that are uplifting and powerfully rhythmic, but also have that sense of closure, of something coming to an end. We wanted it to be a bit euphoric, not in the sense of Dance Euphoria Vol 2, more that sense of release you get at the end of the night on the dancefloor. We also didn’t want to put too much pressure on any of the songs to assert themselves. It feels like every song on Radio 1 these days wants to be biggest thing in the room and we don’t feel we need to do that with our music.”

The album perks up again with the disco pop of ‘Alley Cats’, a kind of kindred spirit to the mellow classic ‘The Boy From School’, and the tense ‘We Have Love’. Things slow again for the electronic chill out tune ‘Keep Quiet’, and end with ‘Take It In’, a terse, dark tune that breaks into a wide-as-the-sky chorus that’s more or less a definition of ‘euphoric’ in all the best senses.

“We all feel very proud of the album,” states Al. “Some songs are real culminations of what the Hot Chip sound is about. One Life Stand has everything that we always wanted in a song – a classic pop structure and all that normal stuff, but within that all the odd bits, the musically strange bits and the different instrumentation. Lot of the songs play around with contrast, switching between major and minor, which is all quite simple stuff but it’s about the execution of those tricks. We felt we have managed to do it pretty well.”

Indeed, One Life Stand seems to usher in a new era for Hot Chip. It reins in the quirky (and ironic) extremes of the band’s earlier sound in favour of a more balanced, coherent vision while remaining sonically diverse and decidedly punchy. It establishes them finally as an album band, whereas before they have been judged primarily by their singles. As for being nerds, their ‘cool’ status has been underlined by remixers like Drums of Death and Detroit-based legend Carl Craig who take One Life Stand deep into the club underground.

Aside from this, Al and Felix have also been busy producing artists for DFA at their Lanark Studios, where drummer Rob Smoughton has been putting the finishing touches to his new Grovesnor side project. Meanwhile, the next Hot Chip tour is imminent, with dates at a host of major venues in Europe and North America. The days of hawking CDRs around the London streets must feel very far away …

“It does feel like a long time ago when we were carrying our keyboards in rucksacks and had no crew at all, trying to get from Munich to Stuttgart on our own,” chuckles Al. “That era feels like looking back on our school days or something. We’re lucky because we’re not one of those bands that exploded onto a scene and went straight from tiny gigs to playing big arenas. I feel for the bands in their early twenties who don’t have time to get a handle on what the business is like, as it can be exploitative and nasty, especially if you don’t have good people around you. Every step we’ve made we were ready to make, so we’ve been able to develop with very little pressure.”

“I’m happy we’ve stuck to our guns and been ourselves. We’ve always been a pop band and we’ve never been very precious about obscurity or keeping underground. We want as many people as possible to hear our music and if we can get that exposure in a good way, without compromising things we don’t want to compromise, then that’s perfect.”