Hot Chip Not on Hot Seat
April 26th, 2010Hot Chip – Terminal 5 – April 23, 2010
(Photo: Bevis Martin/Charlie Youle)
Hot Chip came onstage looking like Lou Pearlman’s take on a synth-pop band, each member representing a different slice of Caucasian, ranging all the way from a clean-cut suit jacket to red jumpsuits and mullets. Of course, this isn’t some packaged, one-hit wonder. Rather, in front of their second sell-out in two nights, the band arrived in support of their fourth, and perhaps best, album, One Life Stand, making them de facto elder statesmen of This Century’s Keyboard Pop.
The group opened with the urgent “Hand Me Down My Love” while the audience, some clad in glow-stick necklaces, shuffled and shifted to the beat. The set found its sea legs with the third song, “Thieves in the Night,” a propulsive and fluttering number largely about stolen moments and the pursuit of happiness. From there, Hot Chip played “Brothers” before the stupefying combination of “One Life Stand” and “Over and Over,” the latter of which sent the floor into complete vibration and the kids wearing sunglasses into an even more fully rendered euphoria.
In the most interesting turn of events, the group did a stunning cover of Shakira’s “She Wolf” as part of the encore. The high school girls with the black X’s on their hands sang the words and the hardest Hot Chip fan moved around the floor like nothing was out of the ordinary. The band closed with “No Fit State” and “Ready for the Floor,” and the disjointed guys behind their keyboards matched easily with the fresh faces in the audience, meaning you couldn’t find a shred of judgment throughout Terminal 5. —Geoff Nelson
