★★½
Hot Chip is a band that's been derided for being practitioners of "indietronica", 2008's hottest music fad. The hipster genre is all about dancefloor tempos paired with mellow instrumentation or atypical sounds and structures. On their 2008 album Made In The Dark Hot Chip played with these structures, moving away from the technicolor glitch pop of their early work to a more varied and matured record. Songs like "Ready For The Floor" were infectious and meticulous pop hits, while slower songs like "We're Looking For A Lot Of Love" gave the album a ton of depth. With their new album One Life Stand, it seems they've returned to the shallow end of the pool, delivering an album that is cohesively toned down and zoned out, and one of the most boring dance albums I've ever heard.
Listening to One Life Stand it seems as if someone talked this band out of having fun. Nothing on the album even attempts to reach for dancefloor greatness like "Ready For The Floor" or "Over and Over". The few moments when they do are the album's highlights; big juicy slabs of retro house perfectly suited for Alexis Taylor's quiet quivering vocals. I'm not against the album's slow songs; the ballads on Made In The Dark were my favorite moments. It's just that all the energy has been sucked out of the album, mostly due to some truly awful songs that don't add anything at all to album. It's ten songs long and five of them suck. A big step backwards for one of Britain's biggest bands.
Key Tracks: "I Feel Better", "We Have Love"
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