Is up now on Line Out:
Hot Chip, in their music as well as their lyrics, have always played with (and played up) the distance between dance floor bliss and mundane domestic concerns. On the one hand, they’re clearly indoor kids—nerds, softies, stay-at-home dads; basically, men who are flummoxed when their babies want adventure. On the other hand, they produce some irrefutably bumping club music—even if the bump is usually pretty polite and the sentiment of their dance floor anthems more heart-on-sleeve than hands-in-the-air (and even if their musical output is itself the result of long hours indoors with their drum machines).
It’s a tension that makes for greatly moving musical moments (the nostalgia-drenched disco of “Boy From School,” for instance), fine formal humor (deadpan boasts about pumping Yo La Tengo from their Escalades), and frequently both at the same time (the decidedly uptight funk of “Down with Prince”).
So, it should come as no surprise that the band’s fourth album, One Life Stand (out yesterday on Astralwerks), is full of ready-for-the-floor electro-pop/soul about such banger-averse topics as romantic fidelity, male bonding, and cats (and even the cats turn out to be an extended relationship metaphor the likes of which you might hear in marriage counseling).