Pages tagged “hot chip”

Each year, I open a fresh Word document and initiate, once more, a war with myself. This year was no exception. Titled "An Assortment of 2008 Musical Things in a Semi-Particular Order," my list, which includes albums you may have seen previously featured here and here, is absolutely and totally subject to change until Dec. 31. That being said, take a gander at its current iteration:

1. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend (Beggars/XL/4AD)

Check out Paste's top 50 albums of 2008...

There is an inherent, if not unspoken, risk in electronic-tinged outfits performing live. On one hand, they could turn out to be soulless programming presentations; on the other, studio wizardry can fail to produce any real electricity in concert halls, and could even fail to translate at all. Thankfully, such was not the case on the second evening of Hot Chip's two-night stand at the Metro, where the band took the stage to a comfortably full room of attendees in rapt attention.

The boys of Hot Chip sure have had a massively busy 2008. They just put out a new album in February and have been touring ever since. Now, they're talking new EP's, tour dates and songs. Nope, you're not confusing them with Coldplay (though you'd be forgiven, those boys have a lot going on as well.) Hopefully new live drummer Leo Taylor, who recently finished a solo album, isn't ready to run for the hills quite yet.

Diesel announced today that Sri Lankan singer M.I.A. will be performing at Diesel xXx in Brooklyn. The multi-city concert will take place on Oct. 11 at venues across the glo-- wait, what? Isn't she supposed to be retired? We've been crying tears of unfathomable sorrow ever since Ms. Arulpragasam announced to the world that she was quitting music forever, effective immediately, last month. We wrote the headline "M.I.A. Officially Retires" at the time, but it looks like we need a new one. How about "M.I.A. Is a Big, Stupid Doo-Doo-Head That Can't Stop Toying With Paste's Feelings"? You think we would have learned after the Jay-Z debacle.

The boys from Hot Chip plan to take over the world (or at least the Western hemisphere) over the next few months. With a fresh (currently in the works) tour that spans as far into the future as October, and includes appearances at many A-list festivals of the season (Coachella, ATP vs. Pitchfork, Glastonbury, Austin City Limits), you'll have the opportunity to see them play "Over and Over" for the next few months. Get ready to "Shake a Fist," y'all.

The London-based quartet will release a new b-side on May 11 along with remixes of "Ready for the Floor" and the (incredibly catchy and awesome) newest single from Made in the Dark, "One Pure Thought," which will be available for download from via Astralwerks.

Check out the video for "One Pure Thought" here:

Traclist:
1. One Pure Thought
2. We're Looking for a Lot of Love (Christmas recording)
3. Ready for the Floor (Hot Chip V.I.P. mix)
4. One Pure Thought (Dominik Eulberg edit)
5. One Pure Thought (video)

The massive tour:

April
26 - San Francisco, Calif. @ The Fillmore #
26 - Indio, Calif. @ Coachella
28 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Mayan Theatre #

May
8 - Berlin, Germany @ Radialsystem V (iTunes Live) @
9-11 - Rye, England @ Camber Sands Holiday Centre (ATP vs. Pitchfork Festival)
25 - Northamptonshire, England @ Gatecrasher Summer Sound System Festival

June
6 - Nürburg, Germany @ Nürburgring Racetrack (Rock am Ring Festival)
7 - Nuremburg, Germany @ Frankenstadion (Rock im Park Festival)
27-29 - Glastonbury, England @ Glastonbury Festival

July
3 - London, England @ Hyde Park (02 Wireless Festival)
4 - Werchter, Belgium @ Rock Werchter
5 - Arvika, Sweden @ Arvika Festival
6 - Roskilde, Denmark @ Roskilde Festival
12 - Naas, Ireland @ Oxygen Festival
13 - Balado, Scotland @ T in the Park Festival
18 - Barcelona, Spain @ Benicassim Festival
19 - Madrid, Spain @ Benicassim Festival

August
16 - Stafford, England @ V Festival
17 - Chelmsford, England @ V Festival

September
6 - Isle of Wight, England @ Bestival
26 - Austin, Texas @ Austin City Limits Festival

October
23 - Southampton, England @ Guildhall
24 - Cardiff, Wales @ University
25 - Liverpool, England @ Carling Academy
26 - Leeds, England @ Carling Academy
28 - Sheffield, England @ Carling Academy
29 - Birmingham, England @ Carling Academy
30 - Cambridge, England @ Corn Exchange

November
1 - Manchester, England @ Apollo
2 - Glasgow, Scotland @ Carling Academy
3 - Leicester, England @ University
5 - Brighton, England @ Dome
6 - London, England @ Carling Academy
7 - London, England @ Carling Academy

# w/ Free Blood
@ w/ Calvin Harris

Related links:
News: Hot Chip announces U.S. tour dates
News: New Hot Chip song free for download
Photos: Hot Chip - Boston, MA - The Paradise Rock Club - 4/14/08

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The five London-based men of Hot Chip consistently fail to conform. The band blends electronic dance-floor bangers with soulful ballads and a plugged-in, modern-day-skiffle sensibility on record. Onstage, the five form a horizontal line as they man their row of synths, passing one lonely guitar between them all. Needless to say, Hot Chip's singular style will not bow to anyone's ideas of what a band "should" be.

British electro-soul troupe splits time between bedroom and dance floor

Hot Chip has never been one of those bands that uses rave music to wean itself off of rock. Until now, anyway, the band has been more interested in full-bodied hybridization. The British act’s fusion of dancey sounds (rave, house and two-step garage) with more rock-rooted sounds (funk, indie-pop and soul) lies at the end of a long evolutionary chain, where rock and electronic music first battled for supremacy, then gradually fused together, their previously intractable ideological divisions blurring and dissolving. The band’s story summarizes rock’s gradual embrace of electronic drums and samples; a story about a band that loves molten beats and fey vocals in equal measure, tentatively moving out of the cloistered bedroom and onto the dance floor (without, in reality, leaving the bedroom—i.e., the home studio where Hot Chip has recorded all three of its albums).

Hot Chip’s debut, Coming on Strong, epitomized the bedroom sound. Cuddly vocals by Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard (the former elfin and reedy, the latter bearish and full-figured) hung like damp linen over a spindly rack of low-rent beats more suitable for headphones than hedonism. With its casual air, thin production and emphasis on breezy melody over kinetic rhythm, the record sounded definitively intimate, more aligned with indie music’s introspection than dance music’s communality. The album’s flirtations with hip-hop (one particularly beard-stroking track was titled “Shining Escalade”) only added to the sense of Hot Chip as quirky home-tapers engaging with dance music as a tool, not a tradition.

If Hot Chip’s debut was an ephemeral pleasure, its sophomore album, The Warning, was an impregnable revelation. The former was a feather landing on the grass; the latter an iron hammer clanging down on a hot anvil, throwing streams of incandescent sparks. Hot Chip’s hesitancy was obliterated, although the intimacy remained intact via the more confident but still sugary vocals. “Look After Me” was the sort of aching ballad that filled out Coming on Strong, girded by a sophisticated nighttime glide instead of a nursery-rhyme bounce. In addition to beefing up with sheets of bounding, muscular funk, The Warning embraced the big-beat rave sounds that Hot Chip circled warily on its debut, producing chant-laden conflagrations like “And I Was A Boy from School” and “Over And Over.” The Warning was a bedroom album only insofar as the bedroom is where one dances and sings into a hairbrush in front of the mirror, and if LCD Soundsystem gave lapsed punks their own bona-fide dance music, Hot Chip did the same thing for bored indie-poppers.

The band’s third album, Made in the Dark, is happily unsurprising, adding new depths of energy, color and confidence to Hot Chip’s extant sound. It’s the band’s most rock-centric record so far, and also the band’s most eΩortlessly propulsive. Its glitchy grooves now cascade, rarely tangling themselves as they once did. Tripping funk reappears on “Hold On,” but Hot Chip has fully embraced the rowdier sounds inherent in its electronic tools—the Todd Rundgren-sampling “Shake a Fist” includes a breakdown in which Taylor introduces “a game I call Sounds of the Studio” before cutting up a volley of ripped sampler blasts so emphatic that they don’t derail the momentum of the clattering percussion, vintage hip-hop vocal stabs and rubbery synth bass around them. “Bendable Poseable” earns its title with a spring-mounted groove decked out with Owen Clarke’s nimble guitar lead, and blossoming rave-pop track “Ready for the Floor” is this year’s “Boy from School,” with its gigantic singalong vocal refrain and high-spirited bounce.

But Hot Chip hasn’t neglected its soulful meditations here. “We’re Looking for a Lot of Love” is an electronic hymn; gentle waves of delayed guitar and sinuous synths lap at Taylor’s voice. “Whistle for Will” gradually amasses droning piano chords and a slow, cardiac pulse into a sky-gazing ballad, which blurs into pensive closer “In the Privacy of Our Love.” The title track is almost analog, built from little more than curling guitars and off-kilter drums. It’s telling that these titles contain references to darkness and privacy, which is their proper environment, while “Ready for the Floor” betrays a more public stance: On Made in the Dark, Hot Chip has stopped trying so hard to integrate the dance and bedroom sounds it loves, instead segregating them to eliminate the compromises of the first two albums.

Click above to watch "Ready For The Floor" from Hot Chip's new album Made In The Dark, out February 5th on Astralwerks Records.

Related Links:
News: Hot Chip announces U.S. tour dates
News: Hot Chip readies Dark new album

As Hot Chip sits on the brink of its third release, Made In The Dark, many U.S. fans may been feeling the pang of neglect. Not only is the album set to drop in the U.K. five days before the States, but Hot Chip has also previously announced a world tour that seemingly failed to include a visit to its ever adoring, attention-starved America.

Luckily, the band has heard the sorrowful cries and has made the appropriate arrangements. After spending some time in Europe and the United Kingdom, Hot Chip will come stateside for a series of performances in April. The North American trek begins in Phillidephia on April 10 and ends on April 24 in San Francisco.

In the mean time, look for Made In The Dark to debut in the U.S. on Feb. 5.

Dates:

April
10 - Philadelphia, Pa. @ Starlight
11 - Washington, D.C. @ 9:30 Club
12 - New York, N.Y. @ Terminal 5
14 - Boston, Mass. @ Paradise
17 - Chicago, Ill. @ Vic
18 - Minneapolis, Minn. @ 1st Avenue
22 - Seattle, Wash. @ Showbox
23 - Portland, Ore. @ Crystal
24 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Fillmore

Related links:
HotChip.co.uk
Hot Chip on Myspace
YouTube: Hot Chip - "Ready for the Floor"

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

While most of us haven't stopped grooving on Hot Chip's 2006 effort The Warning, that's not preventing the group from following it up in short order. Entitled Made In The Dark, Hot Chip Album #3 arrives in the U.S. Feb. 5 of next year by way of Astralwerks and DFA Records. The release drops in the U.K. the day before.

Vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Alexis Taylor spoke to NME.com about what fans could expect from the new album.

"It will surprise people," Taylor said. "It's a lot more like a live band sound, it's a lot rockier."

The album has been leaking in bits 'n' pieces over the past little while. As we previously alerted you, the group debuted a free song called "I Became A Volunteer" via EMI Records. "Shake A Fist," meanwhile, is currently streaming on the group's MySpace as "Shake A Tease." Other confirmed track titles include "Bendable Poseable," "We're Looking For A Lot Of Love," "In The Privacy Of Our Love," "Ready For The Floor," "One Pure Thought," and the album's title track.

An Astralwerks press release gives us the following adjectives to chew on while we wait for the record's release:

"Propulsive, repetitive, rhythmical, methodical, wonky, intimate, beautiful and uniquely Hot Chip."

Sounds hot.

Related links:
HotChip.co.uk
YouTube: Hot Chip - "Over and Over"
Hot Chip at Astralwerks

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

If there's one thing I like more than paying for things, it has to be not paying for things. Alas, I must resort to either dumpster diving, curb shopping or petty larceny. Seeing as I would be ripped apart limb from limb in prison, the first two options seem more feasible. But wait! There's one more! Be still, my heart.

Wacky electro-pop Brits Hot Chip bring us a brand-spankin' new FREE song for download through their label's web site, Emirecords.co.uk.. Here's an easy link provided for you below, since we know you don't want to work for it:

FREE HOT CHIP SONG!

Thank you, Hot Chip.

Related links:
HotChip.co.uk
Hot Chip on MySpace
YouTube video of "Boy From School" by Hot Chip

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.