Why make sense, indeed? Commercial logic would dictate that the sixth album by a 15-year-old band might supply some unique or novel twist to Hot Chip’s tale – a startling musical development, perhaps, or some unexpected, bankable guest spot to reconfirm the quintet’s place in the pop firmament.
But at a time when their life choices are perhaps becoming more National Trust v English Heritage annual membership rather than MDMA v ketamine, Hot Chip have not strapped on acoustic guitars. Adele does not feature as the soul belter on a deep house-indebted track. No one has left, citing rehab or musical differences.
The album’s title can’t help but reference Talking Heads’ 1984 film and live album, Stop Making Sense, but this is not a nervy, yelping record, straining against conformity. Why Make Sense? finds the London indie house outfit more or less as they always have been, with only minor aesthetic variations disrupting the dulcet flow of their electronic pop.
Those variations, though, are beguiling. The album’s most potent stealth weapon here is a track called Easy to Get, in which Hot Chip’s recessive slinky funk surges to the fore. The production is almost stark: an array of elements (Fingersnaps! Guitar! Frisky acrylic keyboard! Fat bass!) with an uncommon amount of tonal space between them; quite unlike Hot Chip, who normally like their tracks dense. The phrasing of Alexis Taylor’s lyrics on the verses slides around deliciously, where he normally hugs a sweet vocal melody tight. Towards the end, there is a big, joyous, house-y payoff: “Fear doesn’t live here any more!”
Taylor has talked about how this album pilfers more from American R&B and hip-hop than it does the band’s usual house-music sweetshop. The opening gambit of the near-skeletal R&B of Love Is the Future very faintly recalls Snoop Dogg and Pharrell’s 2003 hit Beautiful, and includes an old, old-school rap by Posdnuos of De La Soul. Started Right – a barely-there array of bass, vocals, backing vocals and scything strings – provides yet more minimal funk. “You make my heart feel like it’s my brain,” sings Taylor, as lovey-dovey as ever.
By the time these 10 tracks – still housey, but with greater variation – wind their way to a conclusion, we’ve had a bit of filler, a waltz that pairs fried chicken with white wine, and both great superficiality and great depth. With a keyboard solo that’s wrigglier than a bagful of eels, album opener Huarache Lights gets all fan-boy about a pair of limited edition Nike trainers, and the joy of going out. At the other end of the emotive spectrum are songs like Need You Now, which shudders in horror at the world we live in. The hook – “I need you now!”, sampled from Sinnamon’s 1983 hit I Need You Now – is less the sexual or romantic plea of most dance music than the cry of someone who needs more existential succour. (“Never dreamed I could belong to a state that don’t see right from wrong,” sings Taylor.)
Why Make Sense? comes to a towering climax with the title track – a full-on wig-out with live drums and a pile of beebling keyboards that ponders, among other things, happiness, strength, losers, decline and fall. Hot Chip conclude, with troubled loveliness, that you should “be what you are”; that it is “the morning of our lives”, making perfect sense.
