Hot Chip - A Bath Full of Ecstasy

The Quietus

Across Hot Chip’s journey from art-dance eccentricities to part of the furniture of the festival headlining establishment, the one act they’ve been compared to throughout has been Pet Shop Boys. It’s easy to see why – both groups dealing in a high-energy synth pop tempered (transformed?) by the clipped melancholia of a vocalist who wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing. On A Bath Full of Ecstasy, Hot Chip find an answer to the question that dogged Pet Shop Boys from 1988 onwards – what do you do once the imperial phase is over?

One of the biggest shifts on A Bath Full of Ecstasy has been to bring in outside producers for the first time, in the form of Rodaidh McDonald (Sampha, The XX) and Philippe Zdar (Cassius, Motorbass). In the same way that Zdar helped delivered Franz Ferdinand’s best record in a decade with last year’s Always Ascending, his influence has been galvanising across this record. The sonic backdrop is richer, more luscious and colourful, whilst rhythms that once would twitch are now more confident and loose.

As on LCD Soundsystem’s 2017 comeback American Dream, the album is stalked by a mid-life concern with mortality, a dancefloor excitement that shivers into existentialism. For both LCD and Hot Chip, it’s something of a sweet spot. Glittering opening track ‘Melody of Love’ may be aimed firmly at the dancefloor, but it’s almost entirely concerned with loss, and changing roles. “While I was standing next to you” sings Alexis Taylor, “I overheard the saddest news.” It’s also one of the soaring heights of Hot Chip’s entire back catalogue – its themes of surrender underlined by a well-judged gospel sample towards the track’s close. There’s more of this too; take ‘Positive’, a rumination on old friends who “get together sometimes and talk about how we used to get together sometimes”. At the end of that track’s chorus, Taylor’s vocal clarion shrugs “I don’t know how I can live”, and it’s one of the most quietly heartbreaking things I’ve heard on record this year.

Don’t worry though, there’s no shortage of out-and-out bangers. ‘Spell’, with its nagging repeated refrain (“like a spell you are under, like a spell you are under”) is that rare, joyous thing of a band sounding like the fullest iteration of themselves, almost daring to sound like their EMI commercial apex. ‘Hungry Child’ may be the most straightforward banger on the record but this still crams a lot into its six minutes; a gorgeously soulful vocal line here, a bit of garage there, a delicious drop just before the two minute mark. And that transcendence trick re-occurs on the glowing title track, marked by a woozily psychedelic vocoder hook. In his history of the autotune, Simon Reynolds wrote that the vocoder use on Cher’s ‘Believe’ contained “a blend of posthuman perfection and angelic transcendence ideal” that chimed with that song’s quasi-religiosity, and the exact same dynamic is at play here. They might be concerned with mortality now, but A Bath Full of Ecstasy shows a group pulsating with life, colour and ideas.

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The Guardian 100

(Domino)

I remember walking out of one of Hot Chip’s earliest gigs, a bafflingly hapless attempt to locate common ground between Prince and Pet Shop Boys. By 2006’s brilliant breakthrough album, The Warning, they’d long proved me wrong, and this seventh set is as good as anything the London quintet have done. Its knowing title reminds you that they’ve always been a subversive band – the hymns to marital monogamy on 2010’s One Life Stand are among this decade’s most quietly transgressive acts.

These nine new songs see the band’s gift for melody and grasp of pop’s dynamics tweaked into transcendent shapes by house master Philippe Zdar and xx producer Rodaidh McDonald. The first five are floor-ready bangers, while the rest lean more towards yacht pop Daft Punk or Röyksopp, and the best bits feature some sort of house pulse. House is about tension and release, the ecstatic catharsis of moments such as Hungry Child’s towering mid-track drop, but it’s also about the comforting predictability of that pulsing beat, and that’s where Hot Chip sound most at home.

Pitchfork 73

The band’s seventh album is compulsively listenable, oddly moving, and stranger than it first appears.