In Our Heads

good shit... have heard lots of people talk about hot chip but have not listened outside of hearing their hits out in the wild
there's lots of different stuff in this and i like most of it. i love some global sounds in my synthpop, delighted to hear the italo disco and afrobeat influence on some tracks, flutes has those boopboop boop boops
good soundtrack for my lonely day in the frame shop i miss you joe

This seems to just be another 2010s indie album-because it is. Seriously, none of these bands are very good, and they're certainly not worth hearing before you die. Berlin-era Bowie was made once, it doesn't need to be recreated by a group of amateurs with synths trying in vain to imitate their idol. Another disposable album that shouldn't be on the list.

I feel like I’ve mentioned this in a past review, but the only club I actually enjoyed going to when I was in university had indie music nights where they would play music like this. It was always on a Tuesday or something, so it was never all that busy. Just a handful of hipsters barely dancing while drinking PBR. Honestly, it still sounds better than going to an actual club today, but I don’t exactly miss those nights.

Swings from extremely fun to extremely generic but overall I really really enjoyed this album. A very fucking good time

Listen to Hot Chip and lie

I really liked this. The energy was good. I was jamming along.

All pastiche with little substance. If I wanted to hear this kind of synth pop, I would so much rather hear the bands Hot Chip are aping from -- there is practically nothing on this record that wasn't already done 25+ years earlier. And it's produced with an easy listening sheen that makes it ready for ad placement (I swear I heard one of these songs in an insurance commercial). I don't know, I feel like I'm being hard on them -- it wasn't a noxiously terrible listen. But there is zero chance I will ever want to revisit this.

I didn’t have high hopes for this going in. The only song I know from Hot Chip off the top of my head is Over And Over which I don’t really care for. I was pleasantly surprised then with the opener of this, Motion Sickness, which is an absolutely belting track.

The strong tracks continued until Look At Where We Are which I wasn’t fussed on at all. This was followed by another dud for me in These Chains. I kinda figured the album would carry on downhill but luckily Night And Day was another cracker which got me right back into it.

The rest of the album, while really good, never hit another high like that again. It’s definitely one I’ll return to though.

Top Track - Motion Sickness

The description on this album was electronic music, but I would consider it light electronic because it's more than that. There's vocals on every song and no excessive repetitive musical interludes; sometimes it sounds 80s and sometimes it sounds more modern; and additionally (as another reviewer pointed out) it veers into indie music territory. The songs can be atmospheric and I was always engaged, and of course I appreciated the indie elements. It wasn't what I expected, and I love being proved wrong about an album.

This was better than I originally anticipated. Very, VERY 80’s influenced, to a painful degree. Every beat and synth sounds like it wishes it was born in 1983. That said, they do make something enjoyable out of this retro pastiche. The beat is consistently good and some tracks have this almost dance-able energy to them. The tracks where it slows down were a little less interesting, but the overall album was still a good effort. 80’s nostalgia by a band named Hot Chip, didn’t expect to actually like it.

It's OK. It's early 2010s indie. A little quirky, a little fey, overall unoffensive. Why this album made the cut instead of literally a single Tool or Deftones album, however, I have no clue. No Godspeed You! Black Emperor, no Tesseract or Periphery or Mushuggah. Not bands or albums that appeal to everyone, but bands that either created or were instrumental in the creation/proliferation of entirely new genres of music. Whatever. Out of 970 albums so far, I'd say that EASILY 400 of them are confusing additions to the project.

𝘐𝘯 𝘖𝘶𝘳 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘴 is a perfectly enjoyable electropop album, but it never really rises above that. Hot Chip have a knack for combining warm electronic production with understated pop melodies, making the album easy to listen to from start to finish.

What the album lacks, at least for me, is a real sense of surprise. The songs are consistently well crafted, but few of them leave a lasting impression once they’re over. I enjoyed the experience while it lasted, yet I rarely felt compelled to pay closer attention.

It’s a good example of modern electropop, just not one that I find especially memorable.

Fun little album, but I don't remember a single thing from it

Ah ok, so this is what Hot Chip sounds like (and why I have no memory of it despite inevitably having heard them at some point).

There are bits that are good here and there, and I like electronica as a genre quite a lot, so I have no problem with it from that angle. But this record isn't very surprising or interesting to me. Maybe I would prefer their earlier stuff? Wikipedia says they're influenced by Roxy Music and Royal Trux, which I'm kind of baffled by on the basis of this album alone.

2 stars

Hot Chip got added in as part of the 2013 edition of the book - just one year after the album's release. It's one of those cases where, hearing it fresh today, the significance of its inclusion is weakened; the writers could not have foreseen this particular sound being diluted to hell in the following decade. Case in point: most of these songs come across as Discover Weekly fodder.

Of course, Discover Weekly does tend to bless you with some divine pulls every once in a while.......

Standouts: Motion Sickness • These Chains • Night and Day

Boring

Hot Chip cool. Surely earlier albums are more essential? I don't know but I'm fairly confident Rob would have blown it. Or in classic over doing it fashion, they're on here too.

it was ok

This was a new discovery for me. I had never heard of these people. It honestly is a lovely little pop dance album. A bit of fluff that I’m not sure I’ll remember for long, but quite an enjoyable listen. Reminds me a bit of the Bee-Gees, although without the harmonizing. But the same sort of lightweight dance feel.

3.75 Great for running and completing tasks