Hot Chip is a singles band. What once would have been a gracious compliment in the 50s and 60s when LPs were being assembled recklessly while crisply produced 45s were pored over with zealous appreciation has now become a slighting blow suggesting that only the mp3 age has saved the target from the doom of obscurity. It’s not that singles bands can’t make good albums (Buzzcocks spring to mind), and in fact, Hot Chip has delivered three before now ranging from serviceable to very good. But Hot Chip’s strengths lie in electronic dance music, a genre known for its hits, not its long players. On their finest albums, they threw whatever they could at the listener—the losers hampered nothing sandwiched between dancefloor jams, disco rockers, synth bubblers and buoyant pop ditties. Narrative artifice or mood evocation wasn’t really beyond them, they just didn’t care (and neither did we).
With One Life Stand, Hot Chip actually takes a stab at a complete record, one with a fairly consistent mood, subject and performance. That subject is love, which, of course, is one of the strongest emotions available to us silly human beings. And they shoehorn this feeling into a style that doesn’t usually react well to the spectrum of humanity, at least beyond the superficial level. Superficiality was never Hot Chip’s enemy before this—it’s not that they didn’t reflect an emotional pull, a yearning, an earnest desire, but the words were skeletons to these themes while the listener devised their own degree of interest. This might explain why most of Hot Chip’s best songs to this point left little verbal impression on the mind while the melodies rattled around inside there for hours. “I can’t hear your voice, do I have a choice? You’re sinking below, I’m using my force. I’m hoping with chance you might take this dance. You’re my number one guy.” Flimsy, slight and instantly forgettable, but who doesn’t still find 2008’s “Ready for the Floor” to be pretty damn irresistible?
Likewise, “Happiness is what we all want/May it be that we don’t always want,” isn’t going to inspire a lot of deep thought or sentiment. But it comes packaged in One Life Stand leadoff, “Thieves in the Night.” Beginning with a so-ordinary-to-be-considered-blasé synth ebb, a pounding drum sets up the base rhythm, then adds a bubbly melody, skews the beat off balance, dribbles over laser keys, and even throws in a brief but gnarly distorted guitar figure. It is, quite simply, the most exasperatingly catchy thing Hot Chip has released since “Over and Over,” and I couldn’t care a whiff about the boilerplate phrases. The album embarks on such a ludicrously high note, in fact, that fears that it will be all downhill from there hastily surface—these fears prove valid.
That dizzying high doesn’t leave a sour taste immediately, though. The entire first side is dominated by appealing, if alternately empty and soppy, pop tunes. Most seem to thrive in spite of irritating elements. Prime example: “Hand Me Down Your Love” is overly simplistic, imprecise sentiment repeated ad nauseum (“Hand me down your love,” “Open up my love,” “Write me down my love,” each cooed eight times apiece), but its stomping piano drive actually (absurdly) makes it one of the disc’s more muscular offerings musically. “I Feel Better” follows in a similar tradition, employing an arrangemnt equally inspired by Italo-disco and faux-dramatic adult contemporary exasperated by more helplessly creaky verbiage—“There is a day that is yours for embracing/Everything is nothing and nothing is ours.” Ignore the sappy melodrama and get swept up in their admittedly lovely charms and be ready to hum it the rest of the day; read between the lines and let the sentiment swaddle you and prepare to unleash a torrent of groans.
When the second half kicks off, though, the group’s sins become far too overwhelming to readily forgive. “Slush” tries for something billowy, ethereal, even divine in its search for spiritual meaning (“Don’t I know there is a god?/Now I know there is a god in your heart”) but the six-and-a-half minute ballad treads at such a sluggish pace and is burdened with so many cloying accessories—the “vocal exercise” cadences are borderline nauseating—that it becomes as soggy and unpleasant as the title suggests. Worse, still, it incorporates odd elements like doo wop and classic country & western in a stab at elegiac beauty, but they’re too muted to encourage a commitment to the endless slog. It stalls the momentum so drastically, in fact, that follow-up “Alley Cats” suffers for also dawdling with the pace, spoiling a fairly moving treatise on loss and the effective sigh of multiple vocalists murmuring, “Oh, oh, there is no pain I don’t know.” This morass even wounds those that would stand in opposition—“We Have Love”’s electro-chipmunk sounds are overbearingly gawdy following all the soupy heartburn, and then that song’s placement makes the next track, “Keep Quiet,” slumber tediously afterward. Luckily, airy closer “Take It In” rights the ship at the last minute, matching catchy, almost ominous verse with soaring chorus; even the shameless schmaltziness of the line, “My heart had flown to you just like a dove,” can’t dash this number to pieces.
Of the key songwriting/singing pair, Alexis Taylor dominates on this effort, which can be problematic on the slower tracks. In much the same way that his vocals were more appealing at the outset of “Boy from School” (or “And I Was a Boy from School” if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) than they were during the diluted finale, Taylor's high, rich warble works better in context with thumping rhythms and percolating beats than amidst synths that bloom and bleed. He becomes too fey and precious on those instances, as watery as the liquid tones around him. Notice “One Life Stand,” where the verses make him sound dry, arch, even disaffected and then the refrain witnesses his throat tremble and his heart floods. I’m all for injecting a little emotion and soul into a dance scene overwhelmed by artless detachment and vacant posturing (especially in a case like One Life Stand where the feeling is not merely appropriate but necessary) but a little of Taylor’s lifeblood goes a long way. Contrast that with Joe Goddard, whose deeper, duskier baritone lends a song like “Brothers” a different kind of intimate pull. Gravitas is needed with a tune like that one, recounting a familial affection instead of a romantic one, and had it just been Taylor singing, it might have bordered on excruciating instead of winding up a small winner.
Finding forgettable fare (even an outright loser or two) in Hot Chip albums is nothing new, but a commitment to principle and topic creates a larger bullseye towards which dissenters can sling their arrows. It doesn’t help that the weakest tracks are all lined up in a row, creating a tremenedous lull that’ll either put you to sleep or freeze wincing lines into your brow. It is extremely difficult to devote oneself to the meaning and weight of love in all its glory and pain across an entire album (even Stephen Merritt floundered at times); it doesn’t help that this outfit’s worthiness is expressed through shapely, kinetic and/or lush pop melodies instead of intellect and soulfulness—you feel Hot Chip in the hips, not the heart. For “Thieves in the Night” alone it is worth your time but prepare to treat this “album proper” as you would the work of any other fine singles band out there—cull your favorites and just pretend the rest simply doesn’t exist.
"One Life Stand" is on sale February 2, 2010 from EMI.
