Hot Chip has alway had a kitschy, novel feel to them that always got in the way of my ever taking their music very seriously. The band, along with fellow glitch-poppers Cut Copy, have always seemed less concerned with music than with style, which they manifested by adorning the album covers with campy, 80s-style “futuristic” and making art-y videos that screamed “i’m quirky!” Even the music itself seemed more focused with establishing an aura than with constructing songs.
On One Life Stand, the band seems to have cut ties somewhat with their ironic, idiosyncratic past, to varying degrees of success.
On the bright side, the band’s newfound focus on summoning emotion from music is refreshing, and showcases a side of the band heretofore unseen. “Hand Me Down Your Love” is a bouncy little ditty, decorated by stabs of piano and washes of violin and static that give the song added depth. “Alley Cats” is a similarly likable song, with band members Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard layering their forlorn melodies into haunting rounds and harmonies.
These successes, unfortunately, are few and far between. The down side to the band’s maturing is that the majority of One Life Stand is dull, repetitive and dragged out. Despite being only ten songs long, the average track here is a lengthy five minutes’ duration, plenty long enough to, say, lose the listener’s attention on the flavourless title track, or to rankle on ballad “Slush” with it’s annoyingly repeated “humminna humminna” verse phrases.
By losing their quirky idiosyncrasies, the band has also sacrificed what made them even the slightest bit cutting edge. Here, the band teeters precariously on the brink of easy-listening, having imbued their music with emotion that feels disingenuous at best and at worst, downright cheesy.
One Life Stand is the sound of an irony-less, straightforward Hot Chip, but it may just have come at the price of what made them interesting (if not irksome) in the first place.
