The Warning — Hot Chip
DFA/EMI
2006
Rating:


"Coming on Strong" was Hot Chip's 2004 entry into electro-soul, but the album was as thick with irony as it was with beats. "The Warning" places more emphasis on the soul of the subgenre while still retaining the group's cheeky charm (apparently spurred on by critical and popular indifference, Hot Chip frequently threatens violence with lines like, "Hot Chip will break your legs, snap off your head / Hot Chip will put you down, under the ground").

This is the warm, wistful kind of electronica — a more muscular version of Postal Service and the more logical progression from the first Ben Gibbard-Jimmy Tamborello collaboration "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan" — rather than a proper rave-up. Although the album has plenty of those moments, too.

"Over and Over" begins with gentle wind chimes, but it's only a few bars before the woodblock, cowbell and buzzing guitar come in and hit hard. Alexis Taylor and producer Joe Goddard sing about the beat playing like "a monkey with a miniature cymbal. / The joy of repetition really is in you." The song is one to jump to, and then one to chant to when it turns into the spelling bee of Pulp's "F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E." "Tchaparian" rides a "Galang" grove and Lewis Carroll allusions: "What can be drunk in a dream? / What can be dreamt in a drink?" "(Just Like We) Breakdown" features synth steel drums and marimba for existential musings. "No Fit State" rolls with a "Heart Like a Wheel" and the sound of "Being Boiled." "Careful" convulses and sputters like Aphex Twin with lyrics that alternate between cautionary ("Watch your step / Take good care / Don't touch that / Don't stand there") and mournful ("Every year, about this time of year, / I am with you as if you are here").

For full-blown pop yearning look no further than "And I Was a Boy From School." Twisting Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" through Stardust's "Music Sounds Better With You," the song is a syncopated distillation of memory. The title track finds Taylor lost and "looking for a place where I can get lost / I'm looking for a home for my malfunctioning being."

Later in the song, Taylor sings he's "a mechanical music man and I'm starting a fire." The same is true of Hot Chip, a group that has found its way from jokey techno to humanist dance group.

Posted Thursday, December 14, 2006

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/music/hot.chip/the.warning