ahem.

Hot Chip, "Over And Over" - It's probably for the best that we get this out of the way early: Even though Hot Chip's upcoming sophmore album The Warning may sport a comfortingly-familiar lightning bolt on the label, it is absolutely, unequivocally Not repeat Not a DFA album, unless of course you want to call Jonathan Galkin hisself a liar. Of course, I only bring this up because I can't for the life of me help but think of The Warning as anything but a DFA album - a really, really, really good DFA album - and in light of the fact that I seem to be uniquely able to see into my own future, I certainly doubt I'll be able to talk about it as anything else. This is, to put it nakedly, all I have; please do not use your chloroform.

I suppose this is at least slightly due to the fact that I'm the least-equipped person on earth to talk about Hot Chip for their own sakes, because lord did I ever think they sucked up until I heard The Warning. I forget if I ever cited Coming On Strong, their debut album, as one of the most strikingly self-evident justifications for file-sharing before now, but I'd sure call it that now; the last time I had an album so utterly unsuited to my tastes pushed on me with such urgent ferocity by people I resepect, I ended up trading in Elastica's unfuckwithable debut towards a grip of tedious-ass Pavement albums (AH SEDDIT). It's not even that it was a bad album so much as it was an album that made me doubt my musical compass; by now I've come to terms with the fact that my tastes don't necessarily match up with those of people I respect, but I couldn't even trick myself into liking Coming On Strong when one of my favorite bands in the universe gave them some liner-note dap, no small feat for someone as studiously practiced at the art of joyful self-delusion as me.

Well, uh, oops. Turns out I wasn't so much anti-Hot Chip as I was just anti-Coming On Strong, because they seem to have built The Warning from the ground on up to address every single complaint I James Cobo happen to have about their musical ouvre. It's significant, for instance, how tangible the low end is on The Warning, if only because it gives you something to play around with while you try to find a hook in Hot Chip's poisonous and all-consuming elan; for all I know, there may be ten songs on Coming On Strong with the sneering kinetic confidence of "Over And Over", but seeing as how none of them try to resonate in my chest cavity I guess I'll never know for sure. See, the thing about "Over And Over" is that the more you move to it, the more the whole song seems to move with you; there's not really a lot that's going to knock you the fuck out, but you'd be surprised just how satisfying it can be to find a way to wrench yourself around to the lyrics "Over and over and over and over and over/Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal" - shades of "Something like a phenomenon (BABY)", or at least to my limbs. And then there's the bells and shit going on in the background, and then there's that menacing, swooping buzzsaw synth, and and and and. Multiply that by twelve. That's The Warning.

Again, it's incredibly tempting to just give all the credit for this to the DFA regardless of how much input they had into The Warning's sound; this is, after all, the same production outfit that got a hellacious psych-disco stormer out of motherfuckin' Nine Inch Nails, nearly inarguably the least funky band of all time. But the more I think about The Warning, the more it feels like Hot Chip validating everything the DFA stood for rather than the other way around - after all, if you're a band who makes your name on the basis of your effortlessly casual machismo, isn't getting signed to DFA the equivalent of Tupac getting signed to Death Row or A-Rod getting signed to the Yankees? You can practically call it a homecoming. And you can certainly call The Warning one of the best albums of the year, no matter who ends up getting the credit. (The Warning is currently awaiting a release date, but in the meantime you can buy various Hot Chip stuff through their online store, including Coming On Strong, an album which you absolutely probably should not take my word on)

Imogen Heap, "Hide & Seek" - You know what I like sometimes? Really, really pretty music. It's what drove me to post the Flying Picketts' immaculate version of "Only You" in this blog's first entry; it's what keeps me coming back to the invaluably perfect OneMusic version of the Knife's "Heartbeats" even more often than the original version; and it's what's driving me to find a way to worm "Hide & Seek" onto every mix CD I can possibly finagle it onto. To be brutally honest, it's so good that it's almost got me afraid to check out any other Imogen Heap songs - it's one of those songs whose biggest flaw is that you can see its imminant ruination at the hands of some godawful Sofia Coppola movie galloping over the horizon after about two seconds. I guess we should just hope that Wong Kar-Wai gets to it first, not that that'd stop her. (Click here to buy Speak For Yourself from Amazon.com)