Hot Chip
One Life Stand
(Capitol/EMI)

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Hot Chip’s fourth album finds the geeky iconoclasts trading tongue-in-cheek for heart-on-sleeve. There’s a continued focus on real instrumentation over digital phantasms, although electronic elements certainly linger. It’s tough to pin down a band that’s constantly chasing a new muse, but the recurring theme of love more than holds One Life Stand together. In that way and others, it’s as if Hot Chip zeroed in on the slow-jam title track of 2008’s Made In The Dark and expanded its sultry, earnest sentiment into ten more sophisticated tunes.

But there’s fun to be had even without the crutch of irony. Whether or not you’ve been clamouring for a glossy batch of ballads and romantic anthems from a British five-piece best known for daggy dance-pop, One Life Stand is an arresting listen that reels us ever closer with each listen. It’s also sequenced remarkably well, so that by the time we reach the line “I thought my heart was damaged / I thought my heart was strong” on the eighth track, singer-songwriters Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard have become endeared enough to us that such lyrics feel like undisguised truth. The six-minute ‘Thieves In The Night’ sets the tone without fuss: an economic guitar solo peeks out from busy synths and an itchy beat while Alexis Taylor cites a cautiously optimistic goal of happiness in his familiar coo. It’s no dance-floor summons, but the album’s core elements are in plain sight.

From there, Hot Chip tempers its natural diversity of taste and influence with a newfound consistency. Every song is of a piece with the rest, despite the pumping synth strings and R&B vocoder on ‘I Feel Better’ or the unconventional harmonies tugging at ‘Slush’. The should-be single ‘Hand Me Down Your Love’ owes its snappy arrangement more to vintage soul than to dance music, which says a lot about this band right there. Goddard chimes in with the softly catchy ‘Brothers’ and the tender snapshot of love that is ‘Alley Cats’. If those two initially take a back seat to more immediate songs, they show their resilience soon enough. The heart of the album – tucked appropriately near the middle – is the lead single and title track, a nifty feat of couched steel drums, elastic funk and disco signifiers, and an aw-shucks chorus: “I only wanna be your one life stand / Tell me, do you stand by your man?”.

In addition to being Prince-adoring Britons, then, these guys are a bunch of softies. Even Goddard’s closing ‘Take It In”, which starts off with a foreboding throb, anxious melody, and dour vocals, finds an uplift in its dreamy, turn-on-a-dime chorus. It’s yet another example of the keen craftsmanship for which Hot Chip have become known. This is a band, after all, whose gigs are dizzying collisions of dance rhythms and pop melody. Over the course of four albums, meanwhile, the band has quietly evolved its subject matter from self-reflexive larks and wrestling metaphors to clear-eyed examinations of why we bother getting out of bed each morning. The message, time and time again: it doesn’t have to be dumb for you to dance to it.

Doug Wallen