TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

I Eat What I Slaughter

Hot Chip, who sound like a fifties phrase for expressing pleasure at your current situation, are kind of exciting. I’m listening to a song from their latest right now, one I’ve listened to maybe five times before, and I just caught myself flicking through my Firefox tabs to see if one was auto-playing something else underneath because it sounds so completely unhinged.

Oh wait, actually one of them was: I forgot I fired up Last.fm to see if this same track was on there in full, and it is. Every post a rollercoaster!

The best I can do for a genre is glitch pop – it’s bouncy and infectious, but frequently revolves around some catastrophic audio error that ought to grate but doesn’t. This track, Shake A Fist, just outright breaks halfway through, then explodes, then spends the next few minutes trying to pick the original melody back up out of the shrapnel. Once it does, the shakey reassembly of that simple tune layered over the aftershock of its bizarre phase shift is weirdly comforting, like an old friend returned.

This is not a musical convention I’m familiar with, so as I say, it’s kind of exciting. Even in the fairly straightfoward opening track, the key word of the chorus “weather” is chopped into progressively looping chunks, so his voice stutters the length of the word like a backfiring hatchback on a traintrack. His voice is kind of whimpy, too, so it jars compellingly with the gusty things they do with it.

I get to give you quite a lot to go on if you’re interested in Made In The Dark (which sounds to me like a polite way of saying “ugly”), because although Fluxblog no longer carries Shake A Fist (though his write-up is still great), Last.fm has it to stream, I’ve uploaded Bendable Poseable (my favourite, above), and someone on YouTube has already done precisely what I was going to do: recorded himself Audiosurfing the opening track, Out At The Pictures. “The Pictures” is olde English for cinema.

He’s playing it on a harder mode than I would dare and doing a lot better than I would, but he still screws it up twice. I don’t really like the harder modes of Audiosurf – the stress of getting overwhelmed interrupts your attunement to the song, which for me is the whole point. So I’m glad this dude beat me to it. Thank you, er, LethaLImpuLse? It seems like every time I have to address a YouTube poster by name on James these days I have to precede it with a nervous hesitation.

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