Boston’s Royale nightclub often morphs from concert hall into dance club over the course of a night, but with London synth-pop icons Hot Chip headlining, the dueling souls of the venue were happily married in one blissful evening performance. For nearly twenty years, Hot Chip have been pioneering danceable electronic music that’s been essential to the development of the genre as a whole – think of them perhaps as the smoother, stately, English cousin to the rough-and-tumble dance-punk of LCD Soundsystem. In fact, the two bands were acquainted early on; Hot Chip released a large helping of their early material through James Murphy’s Death From Above imprint in the USA, they split a live album in 2010, and as recently as 2018, frontman Alexis Taylor collaborated with DFA co-founder Tim Goldsworthy on a solo album.
2019 saw the release of A Bath Full of Ecstasy, Hot Chip’s 7th LP, whose title and colorful artwork immediately give away the game – they’ve returned with a brighter, poppier, and more uplifting mood this time around. Forged in the wake of a pop collaboration with Katy Perry, this is an album that’s meant to electrify a dance floor, and while tracks like ‘Spell’ contain elements of moodier days, briefly hearkening back to the sounds of 2008’s Made in the Dark, even that is aimed upwards to a more uplifting purity of purpose.
The dominant refrain of the title track goes: “I’ve got the cure, the pure remedy / I know I can make you see the colors that I see”, and it’s refreshing to hear Taylor singing something that’s as similar to pure pop as he’s even gotten. Similarly, ‘Hungry Child’ bristles with the modern day pop conventions of sample-driven group vocals and immediately-identifiable drum patterns that, in the hands of these genre veterans, gain a new level of depth and intrigue.
As ever, the unifying force of Hot Chip is how all the synths, drums, and guitars wrap gently around the crisp vocals, with Taylor singing sometimes in his natural voice, and at other times transforming it into an instrument of its own by way of reverb, layering, and a discerning application of vocoder. As a lyricist, Taylor keeps things mostly personal, but deftly interweaves his relationship narratives into the edges of the current sociopolitical climate, without succumbing to the negativity so often found there. In keeping with the album’s mood, ‘Positive’, the song that binds these topics together most prominently, is a humanist prompt to care for each other.
While Ecstasy was the centerpiece of the night for the band during their time at Royale, Taylor, co-founder Joe Goddard, and five bandmates had some surprises up their sleeves as well, dipping into their back catalog for classics like ‘Over and Over’, plus a truly blistering cover of the Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’. While Taylor’s vocals are almost universally polished and pristine, he seized a pair of microphones, one in each hand, and with a truly surprising level of effortlessness the band delivered a landmark rendition of the rap-rock staple. The crowd adored it as well, and as many hands were flying in the air then as they were in any of Hot Chip’s own standbys like ‘Ready for the Floor’, which the band blended neatly into a cover of William Onyeabor’s ‘Good Name’ to end the main set.
Hot Chip have not only survived, but thrived, on their musical core. The strength of their bond as a band who’ve been making music for 20 years allows them to deftly venture into any territory with confidence and ease – this was true in the 2000s, it’s true still with A Bath Full of Ecstasy, and judging by their cover of ‘Sabotage’, there’s many as-yet-unexplored routes the band could take should they so desire. But for the moment, the band seems to be reveling in the joys of their latest effort, a bright spot defying the darkness that so often infects the modern day. There’s something about the specific action of dancing, or even just watching a crowd dance below, that subconsciously strips away one’s worries, and true to the album’s title, it’s not unlike being bathed in a pure distillation of the sensation of unburdening.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
