You Should've Been There: Hot Chip / Free Blood [Crystal Ballroom; 4/23/2008]

All photos by Todd Cooper. Click on any image to see a gallery of images from the show.

In the end, Hot Chip pulled through. Advance ticket sales were pretty stagnant leading up to their gig last night at the Crystal Ballroom (leading one of the band members to quip, "Thanks for coming out … we weren’t sure if anyone was going to come.") This for a band that has been decreed the next hot thing by the extremely behind-the-times music mag Rolling Stone and incredibly unhip National Public Radio. But glory be to the get-butts-off-the-couch- and-to-the-box-office gods, the show was a near sell-out. The other way electropop-rockers Hot Chip pulled through was by not sucking so much on the second half of their set.

Al Doyle on percussion.

As my carefully reconstructed setlist below shows, it was a night of Made in the Dark material, all new stuff from their fresh, slightly more rocking new album. Which wasn’t, mind you, a bad thing. The thing that got me the most was the three musicians on a keyboard/drum machine apparatus. The wall of noise coming from the powers of these three instruments combined nearly overwhelmed Alexis Taylor’s falsetto vocals or Joe Goddard’s baritone vocals. And it damn near made me deaf. Well, deaf with pleasure, if that’s possible.

Alexis Taylor on vocals and percussion.

As “Touch Too Much” kicked on, I retreated to the balcony to meet up with some friends and possibly escape that wall of sound. Oddly, it was just as loud in the balcony. And the huge crystal chandeliers (while beautiful) partially blocking the view certainly didn’t help things. But I noticed something sort of revelatory. I put in earplugs and all of a sudden I could hear the music!

Felix Martin on the drum machine.

OK. It may not be Hot Chip’s fault. The acoustics at the Crystal Ballroom, with its low ceiling and huge glass windows, are less than stellar. The opening act, Free Blood, had an amazing set marred by a note that seemed to push people’s earwig-crazy button. (I saw more people with their fingers in their ears at this show than any other concert I’ve been to. My advice: Shuck the stigma of earplugs and get some, people!) But once I could actually hear what the band was doing the enjoyment of the show could commence.

Joe Stoddard on a Moog Voyager.

Other than their past hits (“And I Was A Boy From School,” “Over & Over,” “Crap Kraft Dinner”) Hot Chip nearly played the entirety of Made in the Dark (other than “We’re Looking For A Lot Of Love” and “Whistle For Will”). I wished they played more songs like “Out At The Pictures,” “Wrestlers” and “One Pure Thought,” songs that held less latent noise and focused more on beats, rhythm and anthemic vocals.

But the true surprise came in the encore. When “Don’t Dance” transitioned to a familiar song that held the lyrics "Oh you’ve got blue eyes, oh you’ve got green eyes, oh you’ve got gray eyes …" and I just couldn’t put my finger on the song title. But it was so familiar. And Hot Chip just rocked it. (Walking out of the Crystal I at least knew the song could be heard on the soundtrack to the film Trainspotting … an amazing soundtrack if you don’t have it.) Today I learned it was a New Order song, "Temptation." (See the video for "Temptation" below.) The other surprise was the inclusion of the first verse and chorus from Prince’s "Nothing Compares 2 U" in their closing song, "In The Privacy Of Our Love," which Taylor enunciated as "in the privuhseee of our love." Hot Chip are avid Prince fans (they have a song called “Down With Prince”) and they’re probably getting ready to share the stage with the newly crowned King of Pop at the Coachella Festival in Palm Springs going down this weekend. Holy shit I wanna go!

Free Blood opened the show with their boy/girl two-mic harmonics.

Hot Chip setlist:

1. Shake a Fist
2. And I Was A Boy From School
3. Hold On
4. Bendable Poseable
5. Touch Too Much
6. Over & Over
7. Out At The Pictures
8. Wrestlers
9. Crap Kraft Dinner
10. One Pure Thought
11. Ready for the Floor

encore:

12. Made in the Dark
13. Don’t Dance
14. Temptation (New Order cover)
15. In The Privacy Of Our Love

Listen to "Out at the Pictures" on Episode 4 of our Signal:Noise podcast, and download "Made in the Dark" here.

New Order — "Temptation"