Hot Chip are not robots.
That is what I was half-expecting as I walked into the Vic Theatre Thursday night. In reality, Hot Chip came off as an obsessively tight band, but they did have moments where they let the music breathe a bit. Not everything not syncopated.
They came out very early (8:15), and you could tell that they were a little pissed about it. This is the kind of band that would probably feel most comfortable playing after midnight. Owen Clarke, the guy manning the bass synthesizer, told the crowd that we were in charge of keeping the band motivated. We went above and beyond.
The general admission floor turned into a dance party as soon as Hot Chip played the opening bars of their anthemic “Shake Your Fist.” Some people obeyed their orders and shook their fists, while others merely danced. As the dance floor became increasingly packed, my date and I decided it would be good time to step back and let some of the die-hards have at it. Pretty soon, the floor was too packed for the thirty-year-old-at-a-rave dancing that was going on. Before long, the dancing turned into jumping, and from afar it looked like the student section at a Duke basketball game.
Keeping the fans going, the band played song after song, often only taking 10 second breaks to cue the next drum tracks. Another pleasant surprise was that the songs weren’t direct recitations of the album versions. Often, they added instruments to songs or stripped some down. Doing both added fresh perspectives for the fans.
Not everything that night was full speed ahead, though. They slowed things down a little, like on the songs “Playboy” and “The Gloves Are Off.” This gave the dancers a breather, and a minute to refuel on vodka redbulls or whatever they were using to keep their energy up.
If there was one downer of the whole night, it was that lead singer Joe Goddard was very unimpressive live. Not that he is overly impressive in the studio. Then again, who cares!? I don’t think there was a person in the house who came to hear the vocal stylings of Mr. Goddard. The people came to dance, and that is exactly what they did.
The Vic was warmed up adequately by Free Blood, a coed dancy vocal duo backed by an armory of sound, none of which was manned by live musicians. It felt like we were attending a rap show with a pair of Scandinavian hipster MCs. An odd setup, but the crowd was into it. Or rather, Free Blood was into the crowd: they ended the show curled up in a ball together on the edge of the stage. Oh so dramatic.
