The Crosstown Traffic

A: A Hot Chip!

On Sunday night I and three other dancin’ f(r)iends took a roadtrip to the Orange Peel in Asheville to see Hot Chip, a British quintet who construct crazy-catchy, genre-busting, dance/pop/electroglitch tunes without any unwieldy accoutrements like drum kits and basses. Hot Chip somehow manage to make music created almost entirely on machines sound organic — due in no small part to the rich, warm voice of the tiny, bespectacled lead singer, Alexis Taylor.

After a bitchin’ opening set from San Francisco-based Tussle (featuring TWO DRUMMERS!), Taylor and his bandmates stepped up to a row of keyboards, synthesizers (or as my friend Danny calls them, “dance machines”), samplers, and sequencers and proceeded to slowly whip the small but enthusiastic crowd into a frothing pit of boogie. Hot Chip’s music is extremely hard to categorize (and god bless that), and they dress in a similarly willy-nilly, unpeggable manner; an unknowing wanderer who stumbled into the Orange Peel on Sunday night could be forgiven for assuming, as one of my companions mentioned, that “the majority of these guys look like they could be child molesters.”

Yes, they’re nerdy and pasty and kinda goofy-lookin’, but holy hell, did they manage to put on a show — and with the sparsest of actual instruments! (ed. note: I’d like to apologize for not being able to say exactly who is who in the band, but it’s freaking impossible to figure out, even with the all-knowing internet.) Other than the machines, Taylor and two of the other guys passed an electric guitar around, and they had some bongos and congas set up, plus a glorious cowbell. They played a ton of new songs, some of which were great and some of which seemed a bit boring, a couple of songs from their 2005 debut LP, Coming on Strong (including crowd fave “Crap Kraft Dinner”), and some choice cuts from last year’s The Warning, reworking the melancholy “And I Was A Boy From School” (I know, dance-y and melancholy?! This is the magic of Hot Chip) and “(Just Like We) Breakdown” into still-recognizable but distinctly different versions of the album cuts.

Although personally I would’ve liked to hear more from The Warning (especially the title track), nothing could’ve been better than when the band launched into their “hit,” a slyly meta ode to repetition called “Over and Over.” First of all, I’ve never in my life seen as many gangly, awkward white boys dancing like madmen as I did at Hot Chip, and when “Over and Over” started, the crowd reached a whole new pinnacle of agitation. Taylor coyly added an extra stanza to the first verse of the song, prolonging the beautiful/awful tension before the pounding beats of the chorus kicked in, and when it finally did, anyone who wasn’t dancing already let loose and the place exploded! It was easily one of the most joyful moments I’ve experienced at a show in a long, long time — I mean, what beats a giant dance party?

After “Over and Over,” the band exited the stage and eventually came back to deliver a somewhat lackluster-in-comparison encore (really, nothing was going to top that first finale) and about 10 seconds after the house lights came up, a crazy fistfight broke out in the center-front of the room (about two feet from me). It somehow seemed a fitting coda to a brilliant evening of merriment and mayhem. Anyway, give a listen to “Over and Over” below — I’d rank it as one of my top 50 songs of 2006. Maybe even top 25…but that’s another post for another day.

Hot Chip – “Over and Over”

–sm