New Hot Chip songs always seem like spaceships: sleek, polished, unsubtle, a little ridiculous. These qualities make it easy to marvel at the work of the London group while also underestimating it. Hot Chip have been around for nearly 20 years now, and though they reached a peak about halfway through (their mid-career albums Made in the Dark and One Life Stand are hard to choose between), they’ve never entirely dropped off. Their last album, 2015’s Why Make Sense, was a grower, complete with one of their best singles to date (“Started Right”). Their new one, A Bath Full of Ecstasy, sounds at first so Hot Chippy as to be a caricature, with big Technicolor beats and big, tenderly sung ballads from lead vocalist Alexis Taylor, but it turns out to be another strong entry. For the most part, it’s compulsively listenable, oddly moving, and stranger than it first appears, as the band gets existential on the dance floor.
This is despite some truly dopey lyrics. The opener is called “Melody of Love,” and floats this sentiment at you: “I always seem to hesitate/Too little always comes too late/There is a sound that resonates/A melody of love.” That’s purpler than a bruise. But Hot Chip have one of the more interesting relationships with banality this side of Dan Bejar (think of their ludicrous, beautiful song “Brothers”). And the more you listen to “Melody of Love,” the more comforting you find it. The scale of the music is just immense, enough to dwarf the silliness of the words. The track was created from a 12-minute, gospel-sampling instrumental track and whittled down to a state of intense purity with the help of the xx producer Rodaidh McDonald, but it still feels colossal. At some point, even the lyrics start to make sense as a catalyst for free association. A line as throwaway as “Do you have faith to feel in this world” seems profound for the kinds of thoughts it inspires with the soaring music accompanying it.
If this sounds like testimony from someone who has done a slow-acting but effective hallucinogen, then I’ve managed to deliver the correct impression. Hot Chip recruited the psychedelic whiz Philippe Zdar, of Cassius, and his Dionysian energy overflows as he monkeys around with the mix of songs like “Positive,” playing restlessly, helping the track light up like the dance floor at Angels in the early 1990s. The band is most effective when Zdar or McDonald succeed in pushing it out of its comfort zone; the lesser songs here—“Spell,” the title track—feel as if they could have been recycled from old sessions. (But neither is without its charms: The hook on “Spell” takes you right back to the “Ready for the Floor,” too catchy to dismiss entirely.)
Taylor had an interesting exchange with a reporter at The Guardian on the subject of chemical escape. The reporter seemed more than a little bit taken with the idea that the “ecstasy” in the album’s title was an explicit reference to the party drug. Taylor responded that the feeling of ecstasy was “just a nice thing to be talking about these days.” Whether drug-induced or not, it didn’t matter to him (and it shouldn’t, really, to anybody). More to the point, the songs on A Bath Full of Ecstasy were written “for people to bathe in, or be lost in an active way,” he explained. This goal, when met, puts the best songs here in line with recent releases from Neneh Cherry and Helado Negro. It’s music that creates a soothing bubble, not to seal off the outside world but to create space to breathe within it. For perspective, not escape.
The tracks that best exemplify that idea are mostly mid-tempo numbers in the album’s back half. The entire band rises to meet Taylor’s dreamy melancholy on “Why Does My Mind?,” one of a pair of heartbreaking songs, and perhaps Hot Chip’s most Zen expression to date, as Taylor wishes away his desires, lust, and blues. Goddard follows on its fraternal twin, “Clear Blue Skies,” his friendly, casual warbling belying the weight of the questions he poses (“Why does it matter?”) over a 2-step-indebted beat that sounds like something Kieran Hebden, a friend of the band, might have cooked up. It all wraps up with the gorgeous “No God,” where Taylor jubilantly embraces life on Earth, rejecting the importance of anything else. (“No God… can make me feel the way you make me feel.”) Perhaps 70 years ago, the suggestion that a romantic connection could be more important than a divine one would have registered as a radical act. Now, it scans as sweet and a bit strange, the perfect Hot Chip combination. Also, it’s a jam.
Buy: Rough Trade
