Hot chip – One life stand

Written by Hakim | 27 January 2010

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Hot chip – One life stand

Released: December 2009

Rating: 66 out of 100

Hot chip are an English band that mixes electro pop and indie rock. They have been active since 2000 and they released their fourth album 'One life stand' digitally on late 2009, until it's release in 2010 on Cd's. The band is composed of 5 guys, and all of them play synthesizers among other instruments like guitar, bass, drums... That's why synthesizers are almost in every one of their songs.

'One life stand' starts off with the song 'Thieves in the night', and already it starts with electronic sounds, and bass drums' steady pulse, until the voice of the singer 'Alexis Taylor' comes in. The synthesizers then go higher and higher, new sounds come in, lasers, machine drums... Nice and easy start with this futuristic disco track.

The next song, 'Hand me down your love' is not as futuristic, I'd say it's even closer to classic, love song, piano chords, simple drum lines, then some nice strings come in. There is slightly some keyboards, but nothing very hostile.

Next one is the song is 'I feel better', a very new age song. It starts of with a nice and rich strings line. It mixes new and old at the same time. The band made classic strings and disco elements go together very well in this one.

alt Then comes the first single of the album 'One life stand'. I'm not a big fan of it. It just sounded like a summer boring hit, not much art nor music in it. It's more of a House music than anything like electronic or pop music. It changes slightly in the middle and becomes better, but the harm is already done, it's not really fun to listen to a song just to enjoy half of it.

Back to some better music with the song 'Brothers'. It's the kind of nice songs that 'Hot chips' got us used to in the last albums. Nothing much to say about it, just some nice piano chords and the usual synthesizers back, with the calm voice of 'Alexis Taylor'.

The album's best shot occurs at this point with both two next songs. They are Hot Chip's most organic songs in this album, I think even in the previous ones. No much synthesizers on them, just some slight touches to fill in the blacks. 'Slush' is a ballad in a 6/8 time signature. It opens with a curious vocal exercise filling in for the expected guitar arpeggio. 'Alexis Taylor' sings a sweet melody. And then, at the song's halfway point, some trembling steel drums arrive, very beautiful song.

The next track 'Alley cats', is even better. It's my favorite one on this album. It simply features a continually-evolving melody and a pulsing rhythm, it's built upon classic pop rock music components: guitar, piano , violin and vocal harmonies. At the same time simple, and beautiful.

The ending songs of the albums, 'Keep quiet' and 'Take it in', are just some typical 'Hot chips' style again, nothing too exciting.

This album has some ups and downs, it's a little screwed at some point, a lot of the songs are just familiar stuff we hear every day, but some of the other songs on the other hand are beautiful and unique, thanks to them the album jumps from almost bad to almost good.