Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 22/5/06
Label: EMI

South London five-piece Hot Chip made their entrance in 2004 with "Down With Prince", an EP whose ambiguous title slyly took the piss out of their creative peers, most of whom were at the time busy proving how hip they were to Mr Nelson's trip. Their debut album, "Coming On Strong" expanded on its mix of lo-fi soul and hip hop, minimal electro/glitch and DIY funk and was put together in the bedroom of one (particularly tolerant) Chip, using keyboards / synths, programmed beats and assorted toy instruments.

As recording methods go, it was nothing radical, but Hot Chip's tunes were refreshingly resistant to typecasting and totally sample-free. Their follow-up was also home-recorded and demonstrates an equally maverick disregard for colouring inside the lines, but tempers the cheek and brashness of their debut with a considered confidence and genuine emotional warmth. It also merges the apparent disparate musical loves of linchpins Alexis Taylor (vocals, keyboards) and Joe Goddard (programming, vocals) into a subtle, but distinctively Chip-shaped whole.

It opens with well, a warning. "Fire is hot, steel can cut, glass will break" they inform us on "Careful", as happy - if unlikely - a marriage of The Art Of Noise's "Close To The Edit" with two-step garage as you could ever imagine. Goddard's confessed love of UK garage rhythms is everywhere; that it is accommodated alongside Taylor's affection for funk and classic soul is another of the record's triumphs.

It confidently sets sweetly melancholic sentiments to deep house tunes ("And I Was A Boy From School", which leans on Everything But the Girl's work with Todd Terry), matches Taylor's soft, reedy tones with Kraftwerk's minimalist pulse ("Colours"), lays down a simple, gloriously infectious groove (lead single, "Over And Over"), tries its hand at Air-like wooziness ("So Glad To See You") and effortlessly moves from New Order to the DFA via Depeche Mode ("No Fit State"). All of this without either obeisance or the distancing bullsh*t of post-modernism.

When Hot Chip first appeared, some claimed that their self-awareness and shameless bricolage proved a lack of authenticity and suggested they were in bad faith. In fact, the band's puckish humour is as much a crucial part of them as their stylistic perversity. "I'm in no fit state to make the record of my life," Taylor wryly claims toward the album's close. In fact, it proves how rudely healthy Hot Chip are. In terms of wide-ranging savvy, fizzing enthusiasm and the sheer brilliance of its dance-pop tunes, "The Warning" is shaping-up to be the "Demon Days" of 2006.

    by Sharon O'Connell