Supersweet

Hot Chip

One Life Stand

Label: Parlophone

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It’s perhaps indicative of Hot Chip’s current footing in the consciousness of the music industry that SUPERSWEET is able to begin our review of their fourth studio album One Life Stand with a quick perusal of the Guardian, Telegraph, BBC and Independent’s websites for a bit of much needed inspiration. As we shall discover, the opinions are mixed, ranging from blind praise to whole-hearted condemnation. So why the divergence of opinion? Have Hot Chip produced another show-stopping musical gem or the first turkey of an otherwise glittering career?

The fact that we find Kitty Empire rambling on in the Guardian about Hot Chip having “effectively hitched the rhythms and textures more often attuned to lust, to a higher emotional calling” as if New Order had never existed, and thereby praising what is clearly the worst track on the record (it’s called ‘Slush’ for God’s sake!) is perhaps warning enough that Hot Chip may well have moved firmly from the dance floor to the coffee table.

In The Independent, Simon Price tells us “One Life Stand isn’t just a good record. It’s a brave one”.  For some reason, our brains kept omitting the word ‘just’ from that sentence. So why is One Life Stand brave? Because, says Price, instead of “playing it safe and knocking out another dozen party anthems” (translation: a good album), they opt for “an album which disrupts and embellishes the familiar … with the strange” (translation: a bit of a rubbish album).

The BBC are more honest, Chris Beanland summing up in the first sentence; “we once thought Hot Chip could walk on water – but half of the songs on this album sound like a band treading it instead’. Pretty much spot on, we think. Listening to One Life Stand is a bit like, we imagine, bin-diving. Yes, you might find the odd unopened tin of sardines to get excited about but generally, most of the stuff in a bin is there for a reason.

In this case, the unopened tins of sardines are few and far between. Stand out tracks, ‘I Feel Better’, with its blaze of layered strings and ‘We Have Love’ with a Garage-aping bass line, recall in part the euphoria of early-nineties floor fillers but they’re just a little too tired to make the impact of the previous gems such as breakthrough single ‘Over And Over” and tailor-made dance floor hits like “Ready For The Floor”.

Elsewhere, opener ‘Thieves In The Night”, title-track 'One Life Stand” and album-closer “Take It In” are very, very okay but One Life Stand is sadly overshadowed by the hideously poor offerings such as ‘Brothers’, ‘Keep Quiet’, ‘Alley Cats’ and the aforementioned ‘Slush’. Band at the end of their creative shelf-life or difficult fourth album? Let’s hope it’s the latter. - Isaac Howlett