Hot Chip Benefit From Big Record Collections
Wednesday April 02, 2008 @ 12:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

By Erik Leijon

British quintet and DFA label stalwarts Hot Chip have a lot of pressure riding on their anticipated follow-up to 2006's electro-pop masterpiece, The Warning. The band's schizophrenic, hook-laden style is pushed to even further musical limits on the new Made In The Dark. The massive amounts of touring Hot Chip have done in the past two years has meant changes in how they create their music. Most notably, the group recorded three of the new tracks live in a studio with all five members, whereas previously founding members Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard wrote and recorded all of the material in Goddard's bedroom. Hot Chip's secret weapon, guitarist Al Doyle, recently spoke to ChartAttack about the making of Made In The Dark.

Hot Chip

ChartAttack: The Warning was a bit of a slow burner in terms of achieving critical praise and recognition. Are you expecting Made In The Dark to have a similar trajectory? Al Doyle: I hope so. We all sort of try to make records that aren't very much of their time, we want something that will last a little while. There are a lot of records in my collection that I'll go back to after disregarding them for years and something will catch my attention that maybe I missed the first time. There are some very immediate, poppy songs, so people will feel they got their money's worth.

For Made In The Dark, explain how all five members played a bigger role in shaping the album and how that contrasts to The Warning? There are three songs on the new album ["One Pure Thought," "Hold On," and "Out At The Pictures"] that were recorded in a studio in a more traditional way. So still not that much of the album, to be honest, was different than The Warning. I think the mindset has changed slightly. Even the songs that weren't recorded in a live setting I think we tried to give them more of a live feel, so we were using longer takes when we were laying down the tracks and we were more interested in acoustic spaces. Felix [Martin] and I have another studio which we recorded in, so there is this different feeling of space than on The Warning, which was probably cleaner and more clinical in some ways. This one is more dirty. It sounds in some ways like an older album — sort of more of an '80s production, like a Peter Gabriel record. The majority of it was still done layer by layer in Joe's bedroom, and still mixed by Joe, so it wasn't a radical departure. It was fun to go into the studio and do like other bands do.

On the new record, there seems to be a clear division between the dance tracks and the ballads. Was that a conscious decision by the band? That's always been going on — making that kind of differentiation in our music. But this time we decided some of those slower tracks didn't really need jazzing up; they were strong enough as they were. For a song like 'Made In The Dark' we could have done something different, but we decided to see what people would think if we released it in a more stark way, and I think a lot of people are passing those songs by. Hot Chip fans know us more for our louder, dancy tracks, which is fair enough, but to be honest we're a strange group of people and we genuinely listen to a lot of acoustic, folky music, yet we still keep abreast of current dance music. It's patronizing to the audience to think they won't be able to cope with slow songs.

Tell me your thoughts on the single "Ready For The Floor." Joe called it the "poppiest thing you ever recorded." That was the most calculated song on the album. We finished the entire body of songs, which came together over a long period of time, since some songs like "Shake A Fist" almost made it on The Warning. Towards the end of that we were thinking about singles, and Joe finished the loop you hear in the finished song. Alexis heard it and thought about making a short, pop number. Isn't wasn't like, "Let's write a single," but "Let's write this in a pop style." We went about it in that mindset: to make it a very happy, very listenable song.

All five members of Hot Chip are DJs and have extensive musical collections. I was wondering if, in today's musical climate, having a diverse taste in music is becoming more important than technical proficiency? It's good to have one or another, but it's rare to have both. The members of Hot Chip have an unusually large reference of music to draw from. I worked with James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem last year [Doyle played guitar and percussion on LCD Soundsystem's tour] and he has an encyclopedic knowledge in a certain era — a lot of American and U.K. punk rock music — but if he were introduced to folk music or jazz and blues he'd be totally out of his compass. He wouldn't be interested, basically. It's fine, that's the way he rolls, but we're one of the rangiest groups I know. I don't see why you'd want to limit your palette, even if the influence is oblique and you can't really hear it — like our love for Bob Dylan and the Incredible String Band. However, their approach to writing music could have a more profound effect on us.

I read that you were the Todd Rundgren fan who introduced the band to the Rundgren spoken-word sample that appears on "Shake A Fist?" Alexis was a fan of that album, Something/Anything? too. We didn't know we were both fans until later. When we were soundchecking, I would go to the mic and do that sample and annoy the crap out of everybody in the room. You know, we're planning to go see Todd Rundgren in concert this year.

Really? He lives in Hawaii. The label is trying to get us to go and do something with him. I'd love to. He sounds like a totally crazy dude.