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May 15, 2015 Issue #53 - April/May 2015 - Tame Impala By Cody Ray Shafer

Hot Chip have built a career on transcending and challenging the parameters of dance music. Their sixth full-length LP, Why Make Sense?, is certainly no different, and listeners will find more than a few breaks in style and diversions in genre throughout its brief run time. Like the title implies, Hot Chip set out to question why consistency is even a virtue at all. Why stick to rules, or patterns, or anything?

Of course, they never get too serious about it, and that’s good. The songs are still deep dance cuts, with an occasional slow jam thrown in to shake things up a bit. Lead single “Huarache Lights” is a defining piece right at the beginning, bouncing through a few verses that jolt and surprise, taking unexpected turns but still layered over a steady and relentless backbeat. The album’s first half follows that structure, until the tongue-in-cheek ballad of “White Wine and Fried Chicken,” a conventionally sweet song with a hummable hook that is inevitably joined with the smile-inducing chorus. Why Make Sense? experiments with a few more ideas before finishing triumphantly with the title track, a psychedelic build of noise and a manifesto to senselessness.

Plenty of the tracks would fit right at home on the dance floor, but this is much more versatile than that. It is an album full of pop glitter, Hot Chip’s signature grooves with hypnotizing melodies and dizzying ambience. With their thesis down in laser-etched grooves, Hot Chip declare their modus operandi a statement on its own. Why Make Sense? is as sloppy as it is polished, with conflicting ideas pushed up against each other, with a design that brings the picture as a whole into focus. It doesn’t have to make sense. It only has to make you dance.

(www.hotchip.co.uk)

Author rating: 7.5/10