Musically speaking, there was never anything separating Hot Hot Heat from a mainstream audience. Their excellent debut album, Make Up the Breakdown, was slick by design, danceable and melodic, tightly wound and exciting. It also showed a band pushing up against the limits of its own talent and experience, not afraid to write a verse with one too many rhyming couplets or to risk a potentially embarrassing affectation. The record had its share of clunky moments for sure, but they never interfered with its accessibility. If anything, Hot Hot Heat's enthusiastic and unapologetic overreaching helped cement their charms.
On their major label debut, Elevator, Hot Hot Heat backed off the adventurousness, and the results were slicker but far less inviting. Though more ostensibly "commercial," the album failed to differentiate the band from any other fresh-faced new-new wavers crowding the marketplace. It'd be easy to write off Hot Hot Heat using the "used to sound like indie band X and now sounds like mainstream band Y" formula, but that's not the problem: Indie, mainstream, or otherwise, Hot Hot Heat came onto the scene as a band willing to sacrifice personal cool to make their contagiously spazzy musical vision a reality, but compromised their appeal in the name of broader accessibility.
Album number three, Happiness, Ltd., unfortunately continues that trend. The chiming guitars and steady, propulsive drumming of the record's opening title track brings to mind the Walkmen-- a far cry from the brainy pop of their original influences, Elvis Costello and XTC. Doe-eyed singer Steve Bays can still write a hooky melody, but where his voice was once brash and uninhibited, it now sounds coldly detached from the monolithic instrumentation of his talented bandmates. The tense, engaging interplay of Make Up the Breakdown has left the band completely, likely owing in part to the departure of Dante DeCaro (later of Wolf Parade and Johnny & the Moon) and his deft, spiky guitar parts. Lead single "Let Me In" builds to an energetic chorus, but it's a rote, one-dimensional energy-- predictable and overdetermined to the point of total inanity. Indeed, much of Happiness Ltd. suffers from one of the cardinal sins of radio-ready rock: stuffing unmemorable verses between overblown choruses.
In a sense, Happiness Ltd. is Hot Hot Heat's most ambitious record, full of string sections and expensive production tricks. The multitracked drums on "Harmonicas and Tambourines" sound particularly massive and forceful, and the fuzzed-out ambience of "Outta Heart" evokes the slinky dourness of Marc Bolan's ballads. But while bands like Spoon use studio wizardry to expose and enhance different facets of their songs, the bells and whistles here never reveal anything about the music itself: "Harmonicas and Tambourines" still tries to fills out bland verses with big choruses, and "Outta Heart" is still aimless and overlong.
A re-recorded version of "5 Times out of 100"-- originally from the band's debut EP, Knock Knock Knock-- speaks to the ups and downs of their new direction. While the new version is rhythmically steadier than its predecessor, and works in a wider spectrum of sounds and textures, it lacks the unhinged urgency that made the song so irresistible in the first place. Without the band charging ahead at full-blast, the song's structural awkwardness is all the more pronounced, and the playful swagger that carried Hot Hot Heat through their warts-and-all early work is sorely missed. While it's nice to hear them aiming for something so far-reaching and fully formed, Happiness Ltd. is ultimately a hollow facsimile of what they're really capable of.
