Hot Chip's New Album Embraces A Breast

04/17/06 6:30pm

by David McDougall (CHARTattack)

Hot Chip have grown up.

On sophomore LP The Warning, the Brit amalgamation of dance-pop, funk and soft-spoken hip-hop have reached a more mature musical place than the faux-gangsta rhymes and simple beats of their debut.

Over a recent beer, however, vocalist Alexis Taylor and guitarist Al Doyle insist that there was no intention to make this their "serious" album.

"We just got better at producing, at achieving at what we wanted to achieve," says Taylor. "But it's not supposed to be anything but a different record than the first one, in as many ways as we could find, so that we didn't repeat ourselves.

"I mean there are deliberate differences. Sometimes where it sounds a bit softer, that's because we we're listening to things, you know, like Sly Stone records. They have the kind of softer but funky sounds. Early '90s hip-hop, Souls Of Mischief and stuff like that. I think we just kind of let that side of things happen. It's a much softer, rounder sound."

"Kind of like a breast," agrees Doyle.

Despite creating a sound that stands out from the Franz-y masses of their homeland, the members of Hot Chip would still love that level of success. They eagerly signed to a major label and, unlike some musical outsiders, they don't equate credibility with staying on an "underground" level.

Taylor thinks fondly of a time when experimentation didn't negate sales and some weird Beach Boys composition could top the charts.

"I think it's hard to get that anymore," he says. "I don't think that's really what sells records currently, in the U.K. or America or anywhere.

"But that spirit of adventure in pop music is very important to us. And all of those people, they were glad to be successful, you know. They weren't dealing to a small market. And we're not doing that either. We'd like as many people as possible to hear what we're doing."

"Yeah, I don't think any of our stuff is that difficult," adds Doyle. "A song like 'Over And Over,' which has just come out as our single in the U.K., has got some strange parts to it.

"It's got some weird time signature sections and strange noises in it, but it's still a pretty straightforward, danceable pop song. And you know, if we can continue to make things like that, then we'll be happy enough, I think."