Hot Chip “In Our Heads” (2012)
I first became aware of Hot Chip through the quirky video for their
single “Over and Over”… I do seem to pick up on a lot of music that
way. I think, even though I’m a big music fan, audio alone doesn’t
always grab me. I seem to connect more to music when I have a visual
‘hook’.
The album featuring that song was their second release “The Warning”.
This is their fifth album and finds them dealing in a similar brand of
intellectual, geeky, catchy electro-pop
The album veers between being so derivatively 80s (such as on “Don’t Deny Your Heart”)
that if someone said “I’m sure I saw these guys open for Duran Duran on
their Rio tour” it’d be understandable. Elsewhere on “Look at Where We
Are” they sound completely contemporary with a gentle soul song with
clean guitar over a subdued beat. Mostly though they fall halfway
between those extremes, 80s sounds and styles with enough modern touches
to keep it from being a straight copy. "Night and Day" changes things
up a bit with an aggressive groove to it that sounds like it's come
from the mid-late 90s dance scene.
The band’s three vocalists give them a little extra scope too so they
can have vocal harmonies going or interplay between the three of them
like on “Let Me Be Him”.
Hot Chip are kind of on that borderline where I like what they do but
can't quite muster enough enthusiasm to purchase any of their albums.
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