It’s perhaps unfair to single Hot Hot Heat out for their obeisance to all things British, or for their fixation on this millennium’s most fashionable half decade (the years between 1979-83 inclusive), but frankly, with their sophomore album (and major label debut) these four young lads from Victoria, British Columbia are taking the pastiche.
True, it’s not as if they’ve yelled “westward ho!” only recently – their 2003 UK debut, “Make Up The Breakdown”, was crammed with references to the jerky pop of XTC and early Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello – but with “Elevator”, their Anglophilia is bordering on the monomaniacal.
The Canucks’ attraction to a more poppy and palatable punk-funk than that of clamorous, North American early adaptors like The Rapture and Radio 4 may have been obvious from the off, but Hot Hot Heat are now competing in such a ludicrously overcrowded, neo new-wave field (see also The Faint, The Fever, The Killers, The [hilarious] Bravery), that they desperately need to distinguish themselves from the pack. “Elevator”, alas, doesn’t help.
From the opening “Running Out Of Time”, the band’s adoring gaze is clearly turned to British hipsters past and present. Imagine a teenage Kevin Rowland fronting Razorlight and you have a measure of this tune’s hyperactive skiffle and appropriated boho punk. That frontman Steve Bays affects the strangulated yelp of a wounded Jack Russell doesn’t help, even if Rowland, Robert Smith and Edwyn Collins are his heroes.
Moving swiftly through the album’s litany of more shameless lifts, “Ladies And Gentlemen” apes “Modern Life Is Rubbish”-era Blur, “Pickin’ It Up” is a particularly annoying and ill-advised blend of Bruce Springsteen and young Elvis Costello and “Island Of The Honest Man” acknowledges Franz Ferdinand, but is so smoothed, buffed and bevelled, it ends sounding like an out-take from the soundtrack to “The Breakfast Club”. Add to that a relentless full-tilt perkiness over 15 tracks (15!) and an unvarying, harsh sonic “light” and you have one battering, no-big impression album.
All up, “Elevator” is a bit of a downer.
