Fluxblog
September 5th, 2019 4:17pm

Fiendish For You


Hot Chip “Hungry Child”

Hot Chip have reached a moment of their career where their live show is essentially a DJ set of their greatest hits, and they present this to audiences with a maximum level of pride and zero shame. They are DJs at heart, and despite a lot of strong album tracks, they’ve also always been a classic singles band. Last night at Brooklyn Steel the group opened their show with a parade of some of their most crowd-pleasing songs – “Haurache Lights,” “One Life Stand,” “Night & Day,” “Flutes,” “Over & Over” – in the way a good DJ aims to get people on the floor as quickly as possible. It’s the opposite of how most live bands would sequence a show, with the goal of building towards a climax in the final third of a set. But the DJ logic works, and when they moved from “Over & Over” into the more recent single “Hungry Child,” the audience was primed to greet it as another great banger rather than an untested new tune to be burned off before the real hits.

It seems like part of Hot Chip’s ongoing project is creating a body of work that lends itself to this sort of performance or a killer greatest hits compilation, and writing new songs is a bit like figuring out what sort of songs they need to improve that end result. “Hungry Child” has a particular utility as a more pure sort of house track than they’ve typically made before, and brings in tropes of the genre that haven’t featured on the other hits. I particularly love the gospel-house elements, and the way the neutral but plaintive tones of Alexis Taylor’s voice contrast with an overtly passionate sound.

Buy it from Amazon.

RSS Feed for this postNo Responses.


©2008 Fluxblog
Site by Ryan Catbird