"Let's fuck shit up," suggests Alexis Taylor on a bonus track from Hot Chip’s sixth album. "Let's go for a rollercoaster ride—even a shit rollercoaster ride." The lines are pure punk while everything around them is anything but: Taylor sounds like the universe's loneliest astronaut as synth pulses blink in blackness behind him. The song is called "Burning Up" and it's vintage Hot Chip: funny where it might be wistful; wistful where it might be funny. It also serves as a mini-history of the London quintet, who first formed 15 years ago. As the song moves along, youthful abandon gives way to consequence, weight, blame. Co-leader Joe Goddard arrives to split the difference in the final verse. "My age says I'm an adult but some days my heart will not be told," he hums as the track evaporates behind him. "Hearing teenage symphonies dancing through my head."
With Why Make Sense?, Hot Chip continue to capture pure joy while acknowledging the limits of such a quest. It's an adult album made by a group of guys in their mid-thirties who know all of the trappings of an "adult album." These ahead-of-their-time pop omnivores—remember the bewilderment that surrounded the bedroom Prince and Stevie-isms of their debut album in 2004?—are now, remarkably, something of an institution, their eclecticism the new normal. They used to be LCD Soundsystem’s brainy British counterparts (the two bands even shared a member in guitarist Al Doyle), but now LCD are gone, and James Murphy is opening wine bars, and Hot Chip are still here, still looking for spontaneity, still hopelessly bittersweet, still trying to get better, still romantic, still funkier than a bunch of pasty dudes from Putney have any right to be, still making it cool to dance even if you can’t dance for shit.
This is the smoothest Hot Chip album, and they’ve never sounded more professional. It's a mixed blessing: For a band healthily obsessed with not making sense, the refined sound can seem a bit commonplace after more than a decade of spikes, jump-cuts, and curveballs. Then again, Hot Chip have always been traditionalists at heart, making pop songs that utilize the vocabularies of house, R&B, and hip-hop rather than the other way around. They've stacked up plenty of bridges worthy of the Brill Building, a phenomenon that continues on the lovingly nostalgic "Need You Now", which is about as close as they've come to matching the melancholy perfection of "Boy from School". The wafting "White Wine and Fried Chicken" takes the band's high/low culture expertise into the realm of gastronomy, and feels like a soul standard for our century. The three-minute song sounds about as straightforward as anything Hot Chip have made, though there are big knots in Taylor's words; whereas much of the band's last two albums dealt with the wonders of stability and contentment, Why Make Sense? seems more conflicted. Existential crises abound, creating discord with the album's glossy finish.
Taylor and Goddard ask themselves questions that many almost-middle-aged musicians—especially in the pop and dance worlds—are too scared to broach. They try to find some clarity within the ambiguities of committed relationships (romantic or musical), exposing vulnerabilities in the name of emotional honesty. "Out of happiness can come a bitterness," admits Taylor—the son of a Shakespeare scholar and psychoanalyst—on the booming title track, before mixing in confrontational politics that spin around ideas of personal freedom: "Why be tough when strength is just for losers/ Be what you are at the mercy of your rulers." Meanwhile, the mildly anti-machine-music "Huarache Lights" has Taylor trying to find a heartbeat between ones and zeroes, but he’s too savvy (or neurotic) to construct any bold lines. "Am I so truthful, or in truth, is the youth just getting old?" he sings, putting his own perspective into question. On a self-critical bonus track, Goddard suggests, "I need to separate the head from the body," but he knows that can be hard to do—a fact that this album, with its bulbous grooves and anxious themes, makes clear again and again.
Why Make Sense? is probably the fourth-best Hot Chip album. But that’s not necessarily a knock, because their fourth-best album is still a very good album. At this point, they seem too smart and talented to really fail. They will always be underdogs that you root for to make songs that highlight the complexity of human experience while also helping you to put those complexities in the back of your mind for a minute. They are confident in their abilities, even when those abilities are aimed at throwing their own confidence into doubt. They are beloved. They are trustworthy. Their senselessness now makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.
