I'd been spending some of this time bemoaning the fact that I haven't been hearing any good new music... I even found myself spending about half an hour with American Idol, which I can say is exactly the opposite thing someone looking for interesting new music should do. [Note to AI producers: ban the acoustic guitars. The show is already a bad karaoke parody; why make it a coffeehouse farce on top of that?]
So I had time to be a little adventurous... and to watch videos.
OK Go: Of The Blue Colour of the Sky
The first video was by an L.A. band that I've heard about but never found all that exciting: The OK Go. The OK Go are a power pop band who became famous for a youtube video that featured the band members dancing a choreographed routine on treadmills. The video was neat, but the band was not amazing. Just enjoyable pop (not that there's anything wrong with that).
So when the band's new album -- Of The Blue Colour of the Sky -- came out this past January, I didn't run out to get it. But as I was perusing some of the new music videos on demand, I came across this one for the new single, "This Too Shall Pass." I thought immediately that the video was just aonther gimmick, but they actually re-recorded a live marching band doing the song. The all-in-one-shot video is also brilliant. I had to hear the album. I did. And it is very good.
For this record, OK Go brought in Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann and the sound is a quantum leap from Ok GO of old. Imagine the Lips, Prince and Beck getting together to cut an album and you'll get the idea behind Of The Blue Colour of the Sky. Some of the material, particularly "End Love" and "White Knuckles," sounds so much like vintage Prince, I think it would fool nearly anybody in a blind listen. And it's not just the music. Frontman Damian Kulash's falsetto and regular singing voice here is a dead ringer for Prince in the New Revolution era.
The key to this album is this: The band, particularly in their videos, come off a little too hip --perhaps even making an album of Prince-like dance party music is nothing more than an ironic goof off. But I don't get that feel. The material here sounds sincere. And the sounds Fridmann gets from the band are awesome. The music is dance, but the arrangements and sounds are not conventional. This is not another rock band pulling a Maroon 5 makeover for record sales. This is neat, at times challenging music that also happens to be danceable.
Next time I throw a dance party in my living room, I'm just going to put on Of The Blue Colour of the Sky.
Hot Chip: One Life Stand
The other band I found is Hot Chip. I'm really late to this UK dance electro group, which has had a string of top-10 singles and a Mercury nomination for its 2006 album The Warning. But dance electro is not something I usually go for (Though I liked Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers during the 6 months that electronica was popular).
Last weekend, I stumbled across a 16-minute clip of the band playing its hits since The Warning on the concert.tv on demand channel. My first impression of the band -- five guys who look like extras from Napoleon Dynamite in a line and all but one behind a a small keyboard or drum machine stand (one guy had a keyboard, but also had a Fender Telecaster strapped to his chest) -- was that the whole thing had to be a joke.
As the band launched into their first song -- the ridiculously catchy "Over and Over" from The Warning -- all five members started jerking to the thumping rhythm, as if only the necessity playing their keys and twiddling their knobs was keeping them from breaking out in a full-on display of hedonism. It was a really wierd thing to see. Did you really need five guys to make this music? But the more I listened, and watched, the more I became fascinated. This band was really something. And unlike a lot of duos and other electro acts, these five guys really were collaborating.
I got copies of The Warning and the new album One Life Stand, also released last month. Both are really pretty enjoyable. Hot Chip has an antiquated sound. The blips and chirps and Casio tones of the band recall Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, New Order and any other number of '80s electro bands. The synths sound like synths. The drum machine like a drum machine. Even the guitar is processed and digitized. The overall experience is at once timeless and contemporary. This is a new band doing things you haven't quite heard before but in ways that are familiar (if that's possible).2
After listening to both, and comparing the two, One Life Stand seems constrained. The single, "One Life Stand," like "Over and Over" is a great song, a pulsing rhythm with a very memorable chorus. It's dance pop excellence. It's the kind of thing that Hot Chip seems to excel at: The undeniably hooky song that you can't get out of your head -- the kind of thing you'd love to hear at a dance club.3 The album opener, "Thieves in the Night" is a real standout, too. In ten years, these guys will have an amazing greatest hits collection.
But as a whole, the album doesn't seem to hold together quite as well. At times the tracks are too slow or too long, the beats not quite killer or plaintive, high crooning of singer Alexis Taylor is too strained, too like a choir boy. In the end, there just isn't the energy of performance that seemed so apparent on the collection of performances from The Jools Holland show.
Still, this is an album is worth having, and I suspect it might grow on me with more listens. This is a band doing really interesting things -- taking a rock combo aesthetic towards electro dance music and coming up with really compelling music that requires closer listening than the average booty shaker. This is a band, after all, that can do this kind of music live, and do so in a way that is really exciting, mixing things up, improvising... the kind of thing that this sort of music so often lacks. Hot Chip is likely to give us more in years to come.
Footnotes:
1. 24 hours later as I finish this, the Blizzacane has mostly fizzled.
2. Since the '90s, the trend in guitars has been for the vintage 60s Fenders and Gibsons with little room for else. The sound of those instruments, the pure tone of the '60s were (are) musts. The pointy Japanese guitars that everybody played in the '80s were relegated to heavy metal and little more. Like the Old fenders, I suspect that the synth gear used by Hot Chip has a vintage value. The sounds are certainly vintage. The '80s were, after all, 30 years ago now.
3. There's always been an imaginary dance club in my head that plays stuff like Hot Chip, Chemical Brothers, Modest Mouse and Franz Ferdinand. I've never been to one like it.
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