WOEBOT

In my recent gloom-laden prognosis I forgot to mention Hot Chip, who along with Various Productions embody the new touchy-feely side of Hoxton music. How strange that the coke-zone should start to defrost and actually begin producing tender music of depth? Good music in other words.

Hot Chip might not actually be from Hoxton anyway, from the lyrics of "Playboy", the highlight of their excellent debut: "Driving in my Peugeot, 20 inch rims with the chrome now, blazing out Yo La Tengo, driving round Putney with the Top down." "Coming on Strong" (2005), which blissblogger passed on to me at the end of last year, is a very depressed record full of the woes of middle-aged bachelors. It seems this is a gang of average, overage boys, stuck sucking their youth while girls with ticking biological clocks, or ambitions for more than kraft dinners and roach-strewn ashtrays, pass them by. But the gloom is brilliantly undercut with genuine humor. They bullishly profess to have liked Prince since they were seven (just the kind of goofy pigeon-chested gag I adore) and there's the recurrent theme of the ridiculousness of middle-class white blokes identifying with Crunk culture (hammered home until the joke actually starts to gently open up the ridiculousness of that culture, period). Even the clumsy falsettos and the straining ambitiousness of two and three-part harmonies is gently self-mocking.

The latest record is a huge leap forward in production and ambition. Gone is the edge-of-squatland Young Marble Giants-esque shamble and in its place a much flashier self-confident sound. The vocal harmonies are even self-assured! I was really chuffed to discover a copy of "The Warning" (2006) on vinyl, these may still be kicking around, grab one if you can, the photo above isn't actually of my copy which is black as night with embossed shapes, but a scan. Also I dropped my camera in a Chinese restaurant at the weekend and it's reet fucked-up. There's a whole raft of exquisite pop tunes on this, absolutely essential, LP. "The Warning", "Over and Over", "Breakdown" and "Careful" are all astonishingly hooky. If I had to peg the sonic, I'd say hot dang at last someone has picked up where The Beta Band left off on the truly wonderful "Hot Shots II" (2001) before they lost all their confidence in the face of a nation of wretched derivative Indie-Rock and blew it with "Heroes to Zeroes" (2004).

There is just one shadow casting itself over Hot Chip, and that's (whisper it) The Squeeze. That's right, there's something ever-so-slightly "reliable Lunden" about them, but as long as they keep the sonic freaky, like on the Acen-influenced neo-Ardkore of "Careful" well it's cool with this cat.