NYLON - February 2008 - (Page 100) IN THE MIX Hot Chip’s helter skelter approach to music-making has resulted in one beautifully deranged new album. By Eviana Hartman. Photographed by James Ryang MySpace allows bands to list three musical genres. In the case of Hot Chip, that’s simply not fair. The London-based quintet’s page reads “Melodramatic Popular Song/ Neo-Soul/ 2-step,” but their sound might best be described as a beautiful mess. Though grounded in synthpop, the band deploys everything from hip-hop to rock to grime to lounge-lizard cheese and Atari soundtracks, all set to lyrics that at some moments are laugh-out-loud ironic and at others chillingly sincere. Few bands can so effectively make both your ass shake and your heart break. Though a success by indie-world standards— 2006’s The Warning was nominated for the U.K.’s prestigious Mercury Prize, the band brought down the house at Coachella last summer, and they’re some of the most soughtafter remixers on the planet—Hot Chip keep a pretty low profile. They have, until now, refused to be interviewed and, says guitaristkeyboardist Al Doyle, assembled with his cohorts in the conference room of their record label in lower Manhattan, “we disseminate a lot of misinformation about ourselves.” The truth: vocalist-keyboardist Joe Goddard and bespectacled vocalist Alexis Taylor—the latter’s androgynous, soulful falsetto sounds unlike any other voice in music—formed a band called Hot Chip while in high school in London in the early ’90s; guitarist/keyboardist Owen Clarke was a classmate. (Their early sound was, according to Goddard, “rubbish.”) Beatmaker Felix Martin attended university with Doyle, who met Taylor after graduation while both were working for Domino Records. Resurrecting its early name, the new version of the band convened in 2000. “We can all agree we like strange choices of instruments, strange melodies, strange ideas,” says Goddard. Asked about their musical backgrounds, they shrug. Quips Clarke: “I haven’t got one, really.” Only Doyle, a classical cellist in his boyhood, has taken music lessons. That may be for the best. Their third record, Made in the Dark, flouts nearly every convention in the book, adding ’70s metal, dancehall, dubstep, and Hot 97-style R&B to the band’s arsenal for a sound more propulsive and lavishly layered—and even more cacophonous—than their previous efforts. Some of the tracks were recorded in a proper studio, a first for the band (who had previously declined use of the storied facilities of its label, DFA, in favor of a trusty lowbudget setup in Goddard’s bedroom). “It ended up a bit more rock-y,” says Doyle. “We enjoyed dirtying up the sounds a bit.” “One of our favorite things to do is roll up to festivals with Black Sabbath blasting out of the van,” says Goddard. “Some of the songs are trying to have that enormous riff.” “We’d say, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to do a really fast rock ’n’ roll song with riffs from Black Sabbath and beats like R&B?’ Or, ‘how about Phil Spector-style production mixed with fast hip-hop influence in the drums?’” adds Doyle, whose black three-piece suit is adorned with a brooch in the shape of a cactus; turquoise Wayfarers protrude from the jacket pocket. “There isn’t a theme to the whole record, but the different songs are attempts to reimagine one type of music as another type of music.” To wit: “One Pure Thought” opens with a guitar-god solo before dissolving into a dreamy space-disco ruckus. “Hold On” evokes a disco-fied LCD Soundsystem (DFA labelmates for which Doyle is also a touring member); “Don’t Dance,” with its beats that swerve maniacally from dancehall to trance, renders its title impossible to obey. And the ballads don’t disappoint, particularly “We’re Looking for a Lot of Love,” an organ-driven, hold-up-your-lighters anthem punctuated with Caribbean drums. Bizarre as that all may sound, in Hot Chip’s hands, it works—just ask anyone who’s seen their legendary live shows, where many of the songs have been tested out. “We just played in São Paolo and in the middle of the show, the power went out and didn’t come back on for 15 minutes,” says Goddard. “We were running around sort of waving to the audience; they probably thought it was a stunt. The first two rows started doing a crazy synchronized dance routine.” He laughs. “Hardly anyone left.” groomer: mariko tokuno
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