Hot Chip – One Life Stand
Sorry, bit of a work-related delay, there – let’s shunt this train back onto the tracks, then…
[Video][Website]
[5.79]
Doug Robertson: Hot Chip have a habit of doing songs that sound slight and unmemorable on first listen, but end up lodged in the brain like a friendly earwig. This is another moody masterpiece of minimalism that you will want to hear over and over. Arf.
[7]
Ramzy Alwakeel: Five and a half further minutes of needy bitcore with precarious vocals, just in case Made in the Dark was actually a hallucination. Doubtless, familiarity will have bred indifference within the next few listens, so it’s important to note at this stage that it’s really not very good.
[3]
Anthony Easton: I find this affecting, though the music is monotonous, the lyrics are founded on a horrible pun, and the delivery is intended to manipulate you into feeling sorry for an indie twat.
[3]
Ian Mathers: What made “Wrestlers” (and most of Hot Chip’s other singles) genius was the way that Alexis Taylor and the rest of Hot Chip got to a surprisingly moving emotional climax in the middle of what was ostensibly a silly song; given how easy the band found that tone when they were keeping part of the song firmly tongue in cheek and the way the band has been talking about their newfound embrace of actual sincerity/vulnerability, you’d be forgiven for worrying that “One Life Stand” might succumb to mawkishness or schmaltz. But Hot Chip have also gone ahead and made their most kinetic album yet, and the collision between the lack of ironic distance and the foregrounded grooves is what makes “One Life Stand” one of their best songs yet. That and the steel drums.
[10]
Alfred Soto: After an uncertain thirty seconds, during which two twee boys faff around waiting for the twitchy beat and get a steel drum instead, this begins to soar, tentatively. As usual with these guys, they write an indelible chorus in search of a worthy tune (and remix).
[6]
Martin Kavka: The rhythm track to this owes a lot to Laid Back’s “White Horse,” but whereas that track was a call to stop using heroin, this is a call to monogamy. There’s just enough discomfiting dissonance in the various keyboard lines to make the listener suspect that the call will go unheeded.
[6]
Keane Tzong: Hot Chip are always a little disappointing to me, not quite managing to marry their blend of twee and dance as expertly as they seem to think they do. This is phenomenally successful, though, hooky and wildly catchy without being half as contrived as previous singles (or worse, previous album tracks).
[9]
Martin Skidmore: As indie electronica acts go, I like their music well enough, though this sounds particularly clumsy and amateurish. I’m not sure if I like or dislike the sounds that resemble steel drums – probably the latter, since they don’t add any bright energy. Still, the real trouble is the dismal and tuneless vocals, as usual. It also goes on too long and is a flimsy song, despite a neat title.
[4]
Iain Mew: That title’s concept’s mixture of the goofy and sincere is absolutely perfect for Hot Chip and the song is similarly archetypal. There’s nothing here that they didn’t already perfect on “Ready for the Floor” but, well, they have perfected it.
[7]
Alex Macpherson: Hot Chip’s hooks tend to be strong enough and their production inventive enough for their squonky electrodribble to pass muster; but Alexis Taylor’s voice is weedy enough that he usually dampens their songs sufficiently that they do little more than that. Here, he keeps things relatively simple and doesn’t outright wreck it, but despite its catchiness and compared to their best work — “Over And Over”, “Ready For The Floor” — the groove of “One Life Stand” is oddly lacklustre.
[5]
Alex Ostroff: The verses are arch and affected over thumping 4/4 beats — everything insufferable about male-fronted dance music. Thankfully, the processed steel pan drums are a nifty enough trick that Hot Chip hold my attention until the chorus, which ditches the guardedness in favour of pleas of quiet need and a genuine groove.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: Hot Chip’s anaemic, weedy disco is perhaps one of music’s least comprehensible con jobs of the last decade, and people seem compelled to defend all their shortfalls — weak melodies, awful singing — as part of some deliberate aesthetic. This is bunk, as some of their better singles have shown they can write good hooks and get a good propulsive groove, but this has none of those things. “Ready For The Floor” it isn’t.
[4]
Mallory O’Donnell: If this was anyone else, it’d be an 8. Maybe it’s the burden of love to be more demanding, but I look for surprises, humor and ruddy joy from my Hot Chip. This is merely a good pop song, well-executed, and relatively free of the more interesting elements of their personality.
[6]
Matt Cibula: Sorry but for all its adorablosity and shiny surfaces I find this curiously bloodless. Maybe that’s the whole point of Hot Chip, but it’s not the whole point of me.
[5]
This and “Take It In” gave me a completely incorrect and overly positive idea of what the album was all going to sound like. SHAME ON YOU, HOT CHIP.
“Hot Chip’s anaemic, weedy disco is perhaps one of music’s least comprehensible con jobs of the last decade, and people seem compelled to defend all their shortfalls — weak melodies, awful singing — as part of some deliberate aesthetic. ”
What he said.
Eh, maybe that’s too harsh. They’re all right. But everytime I hear this band I fantasize about the Electric Six jumping into the room and punching them all in the balls.