Hot Chip
Made in the Dark
Astralwerks/EMI/DFA Records, 2008
By Crow Winters
I’ve been trying to find a single word to summarize the latest Hot Chip release, Made in the Dark. From my first few spins with the album, I had settled with “uneven,” highlighting the albums highest highs and lowest lows. After repeated listenings, I realize now that there’s a much more apt word: “frustrating.”
There actually is a very good album lurking within this CD’s unnecessary 53-minute running time. Album openers “Out At The Pictures” through “Bendable Poseable” all share a common thread and consistency that have become the group’s signature: creative use of disparate synth sounds, clanking unusual percussion, strong song writing, and a sense of humor and wit simply not present in most of their contemporaries. If this had been a road map for the rest of the album, this could have easily been one of the year’s strongest releases.
Instead, the band veers off course into a series of cheesy , repetitive, and uninteresting attempts at ballads. “We’re Looking For a Lot of Love,” “Touch Too Much,” and “Made In The Dark” are the throw-aways that their titles hint at and, in the case of the album’s title track, it sounds like they were. It’s not the concept of the ballad that makes these innocuous love-and-breakup dirges fail so badly – ”Wrestlers,” one of the albums standout tracks, is a ballad that both is musically interesting and actually manages to have a sense of humor. The problem with these other ballads is their half-hearted arrangements: any of these tracks could blend into the background of your local soft rock stations. Let’s cut these tracks out and our new running time is 42 minutes.
The album picks up again with “One Pure Thought,” which, while lacking a bit of the punch of the album’s opener songs, still stands very strongly on it’s own — particularly with it’s very fun stop-start breakdown in the middle. “Hold On” is the album’s true heart: a six-minute Talking Heads-esque opus of funky synth grooves and a provocative prechorus that easily dominates the rest of the song; “I’m only going to heaven if it tastes like caramel” will undoubtedly be the most quotable lyric from this album.
“Wrestlers” appears next, twisting professional wrestling, sex, and love all into one delicious slow burn. The should-be album closer “Don’t Dance” provides a delightful raveup in it’s second half that shows the “Dance” part of Hot Chip’s dance-rock shtick at it’s finest. In that light, it’s a shame that the last two ballads, “Whistle For Will” and “In The Privacy of Our Love”, exist. It says a lot when the most interesting aspect of these is one of the song’s synth-fart percussions. If you bought the band’s previous release, The Warning, and liked it, then you should probably buy this one too. Just be prepared to either skip a lot of tracks, or make your own (shorter) mix.
