WHY MAKE SENSE?
Hot Chip
Domino
Hot Chip has a discreet but unmistakable contrarian streak. An English band formed in 2000 by its lead singer and keyboardist, Alexis Taylor, and its main composer, Joe Goddard, Hot Chip is grounded in dance music but constructs pop songs, not open-ended grooves. And its club beats carry more introspection and insecurity than escapism or simple hedonism.
On its sixth studio album, Why Make Sense? Hot Chip defies the programmed, gleaming, pumped-up artificiality of current dance music by featuring hand-played keyboards, guitars and drums from its touring musicians. “Machines are great but best when they come to life,” Taylor sings in the album’s opener, Huarache Lights.
Hot Chip has always glanced back knowingly at 1990s and 1980s dance music; now, it gets even more retro, stretching the timeline back to the 1970s. Started Right has terse clavinet licks and stop-start drums that invoke Stevie Wonder, while the staccato keyboard chords and falsetto vocals of Love Is the Future glance toward Prince’s Minneapolis funk. Disco-era string arrangements peek out in more than one song.
Despite all the allusions, the songs aren’t trapped in revivalism. Part of Hot Chip’s charm has been its combination of intelligence and ingenuity with a self-conscious reserve. Taylor’s voice is never pushy; when Hot Chip wants a desperate, belted vocal hook for Need You Now, it uses a sample (from Sinnamon’s I Need You Now).
But the cleverness remains. Cry for You is a forlorn love song in an electro madhouse, full of shallow old-school claps and boops and a shifty sense of what key the song is in. Easy to Get cruises on a synthesizer bass line but its guitar hops all over the place; it’s a tale of infatuation that offers, “Take a look in the mirror/Wipe away your regret/Look for me on the dance floor/Playing easy to get.”
Hot Chip only reveals how much restraint it’s exercising when the album reaches its last (and title) track, Why Make Sense? The drums take on a hard-rock wallop; synthesizers start a nervous, nonstop chirruping, Taylor’s solo vocal grows into a men’s chorus and the end is a screech of feedback. The lyrics ponder whether maturity brings resolve or inevitable decline, but the music promises not to mellow too much.
— JON PARELES, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
HOLLYWOOD: A STORY OF A DOZEN ROSES
Jamie Foxxr
JB/RCA
Jamie Foxx doesn’t need this — at this point, his music career is mainly a vanity project, a lie he’s trying to keep up, and not even an interesting one. He’s an often excellent actor, from his Oscar-winning turn in Ray to Django Unchained to Collateral, and yet despite those gifts, he hasn’t been able to nail the role of essential R&B singer.
It’s been almost five years since Foxx released an album — his best album, as it happens — which suggests either low supply (Foxx has been busy!) or low demand. Whatever the case, his spotty fifth album, Hollywood: A Story of a Dozen Roses comes with low expectations. But that freedom from consequences affords Foxx a looseness that his more career-minded peers can lack. That was clear on his biggest hit, Blame It, his goofy 2008 T-Pain collaboration, and it’s clear in places here, too.
Like a Drum is, titular simile notwithstanding, a seduction song that’s frank and literal and just this side of profane. Foxx likes mischief, and often his lyrics seem intended to test just what a man with an Oscar can get away with singing. Take Text Message, on which he takes a flirtation from the phone to the bed: “LOL, smiley face the emoji with the tongue out/Now I’m kissing you, touching you, freaking you over at your house.” Okay, then.
Much of the production on Hollywood is swampy, but it’s a digital swamp. Foxx’s voice is slathered with so many effects that he veers toward anonymity. That’s not because he’s a poor singer but rather his natural tone is maybe a tad too whiny —and too signature — for the slinky radio R&B he’s aiming to make.
But that voice isn’t something he should run from. Foxx sings in lovely unvarnished fashion on two songs near the end of the album, In Love By Now and Jumping Out the Window, both written in part by the great R&B moralizer Tank, and both featuring Foxx on piano. Here, he sounds engaged and vulnerable, and totally vital. “Tell me one thing: if another man said your name, would it still sound poetic?” he sings, and the part is his.
— JON CARAMANICA, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
SIMPLE SONGS
Jim O’Rourke
Drag City
The rule of thumb for comprehending Jim O’Rourke as a creator of pop songs is to savor the exquisite details without getting hung up on a particular outcome. Simple Songs, his first singer-songwriter album in 14 years, has the arid lushness and prickly intentions you’d expect — but he doesn’t want you to get too comfortable.
“Nice to see you once again,” is his welcoming first line on the album, murmured on a tune called Friends With Benefits. He deflates it within the next breath: “Been a long time, my friend/Since you crossed my mind at all.”
What follows in the lyrics, against a bright wash of chiming piano, strummed guitars and rubbery bass lines, has the ring of a transactional relationship. “There are friends already waiting,” O’Rourke sings in his proudly rumpled voice, over a rock-samba beat, “for the space that you’re containing.”
O’Rourke, whose musical reputation borders on the cult-heroic — as a record producer, film composer, improviser and all-around guru — has lived for the last decade in Tokyo, a calculated distance from the scene that would claim him. If Simple Songs feels like a follow-up to his lauded 2001 album Insignificance, it’s also an extension of The Visitor, a meticulously orchestrated nonvocal album from 2009.
It sounds fantastic as a study in symphonic-rock ambition and studio mixing techniques. O’Rourke’s encyclopedic pop knowledge means that he’s always a step ahead of listeners. It also means that he’s in control of his style markers, which fall here in the realm of David Bowie’s Space Oddity and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, but with more flourishes of jazz-rock and chamber pop.
As a lyricist he likes to dole out barbs, or withdraw the courtesies he just extended. Addressing a younger person in Half Life Crisis, he recommends cashing in, “Cause you can tell from your face that you’re a charity case/And your debt is piling up.”
On the closer, All Your Love, O’Rourke sings: “Please don’t cry/I might enjoy that.” In the chorus he repeats the song’s title against a background that evokes sunlight through the clouds. But then: “All your love/Will never change me.” The arrangement ramps up and sprawls out, its layered grandeur presented as both a gift and a taunt.
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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