Hot Chip Leave No Ass Unshaken

If you frequently read music magazines, Hot Chip are one those bands who have become very hard to miss. When I recently stood in front of a magazine rack I saw the electro-punks on at least six covers. Hot Chip were in Toronto last week to support their latest album Made In The Dark and it was little wonder The Phoenix was packed to the rafters with pre-drunken 19-year-olds just itching to gyrate awkwardly.

New York twosome Free Blood started the evening on a pretty low note. Almost no instruments were played during their set. Music simply blared on speakers behind them, and the duo howled with all the presence of a cruise ship lounge singer. In their defense, they occasionally stopped to hump the stage floor. The Phoenix audience was... well... polite: they clapped at all the appropriate times, and otherwise quietly sipped their beers.

Despite the lack of competition, Hot Chip played a pristine set. They opened with Made In The Dark's lead single, "Shake A Fist" and wasted no time making the crowd shake their collective as. Highlights included their breakout single "Over And Over," sending the crowd into a frenzied mosh/dry hump. This was only furthered by the twinkling and oddly melancholic "The Warning," the infectious harmonies of "One Pure Thought" and the unrelenting bass grind of "Bendable Poseable."

My only criticism is that a Hot Chip show has very few surprises. The guys march on stage in their nifty suits, and simply churn out their songs more or less as presented on record. There's almost no banter, or any other stage antics. Hot Chip did, however, turn up the bass considerably. Most of the poppy nuances were deleted from their songs, leaving behind chunky percussion and Alexis Taylor's floating vocals, with one song melting into the next. In that sense, the set felt more like a rave than a rock show — or at least more like a Chemical Brothers concert.

There were no laptops on stage. Every droning sound, harmonized vocal and blip was actually performed, and that makes Hot Chip's show a little more special than just a rave.