Fifteen years into their noteworthy and tuneful career, Hot Chip’s legacy speaks for itself. Since the release of their trailblazing first LP, Coming On Strong, and it’s fleshed out and defining successor, The Warning, the 5-piece (newly turned 7-piece) act have held a level of influence and acclaim within the alternative dance community that rivaled that of contemporaries LCD Soundsystem. Their bold synthpop stylings enjoyed chart success in the UK when it was still in a very guitar-focused, post-Strokes mindset, no doubt paving the way for the genre’s massive current popularity.
This year, Hot Chip released perhaps their best album to date. Why Make Sense? is an admirable piece of pop, holding true to the Hot Chip style of wearing its influences on its sleeve while pushing sounds further and further, playfully tweaking structure while never trying to alienate the listener. It is also their most cohesive work to date; while the group has never exactly been unreliable, here they’ve assembled an album with noticeable thematic throughlines that also gives every track, single or not, a chance to breath. It’s really pretty great.
We caught up with multi-instrumentalist Owen Clarke ahead of the band’s show tomorrow night at House of Blues. We chatted about weird websites, album design and starting a family business with your mates.
Allston Pudding: Why Make Sense? is a very striking album name, almost in the way The Warning was to me. Obviously it comes from the closing track, but why did you choose it as the overall title?
Owen Clarke: We always have a bit of trouble coming up with titles for records as we’re quite focused on the songs. They all have names that present themselves, to do with lyrical content and so forth. But it’s kind of tricky for records, like coming up with a family name or something. I suppose that one presented itself in that instead of trying to square all the tracks together and come up with a name that summed it all up, it was a feeling of “why must it make sense?”
Over the years we haven’t really made sense everyone, and six albums in there’s no increasing pressure to make any more sense. It’s not us throwing our hands in the air and saying “what do you want us to do?!” but rather a question to ourselves. We don’t need to worry about making sense. That’s not a matra or anything, but it’s a freedom to not have to worry about it.
AP: What were your biggest influences with this album?
OC: Record to record a lot of the influences kind of stay the same. There are certain touchstones, like there’s a lot of clavinet used, which I suppose is a heavy handed reference to Steveie Wonder. There’s certainly an interest in R&B production- Joe mentions elements from Kendrick Lamar and D’Angelo’s record. Things like that have come into it but a lot of the influences are constant across the records but manifest themselves in different ways.
The intentions and the influences aren’t always apparent in the result, though. People have taken away that this is quite a funky record when what we were thinking of wasn’t in fact making something funky. Some of the choices in terms of instrumentation and space and clapping rhythms and the clavinet, those sort of things can be construed as being funky without an intention to be so.
AP: Did having Sarah (Jones of New Young Pony Club) and Rob Smoughton (known for his solo project Grovesnor) join in on the recording sessions affect the dynamic? [both were previously members of Hot Chip’s live act]
OC: Yeah. I suppose the difference in on this album in terms of having those guys with us is that it was an “at one time, in one place” situation. Sarah’s played on Hot Chip recordings in the past, as has Rob, and everyone in the band has appreciated their contributions in the studio.
What was bigger was that this is the first time that Hot Chip has gotten together and made an outing of this, basically. We got a residential studio outside of London, which isn’t the most revolutionary idea in the world, but it did have a bearing on how the record sounds, or moreso how it feels. There’s more togetherness and interlockinness, but also you get the dynamic of not stepping on each others’ toes and giving different frequencies space. We’d often have a problem with contributions being quite democratic and we’d build up too many layers of sounds, and I think this way we all kind of occupied our own space and played around each other.
I suppose an analogy would be a sports team where you don’t all chase the ball, you don’t all run into each other. You hold your position and that kind of stirs the whole team better
It didn’t radically alter the sound but it did mean that there was that space and liveliness in the recordings. I think it is, if not earth shattering, there’s something different there than the previous methods.
AP: Hot Chip’s been going for about 15 years now. Beyond the success you have experienced, what’s it like being creatively involved with that many people for so long?
OC: I’ve known Joe and Alexis since I was 11 years old, so… I can do the mathematics right now… being 35 that makes it 24 years I’ve known them! It’s quite awhile.
But yeah, it’s great! It’s almost like a family business. You can’t really ask for a better job than being creative with your friends. There’s a rhythm of being in a touring band- you can always have low points, but I think it’s a great luxury and we’re all thankful that we can make music as our job.
Also, having other people come into the record is good as well. It’s great working with your friends but other people liven up the relationships. We’ve had people come in for previous records but this record was almost like a broader family; a bigger get together. A knees up! (laughs)
AP: Your couple of albums came out at a time when electropop was very much out of the charts (and perhaps stood out because of that). With synthesized sounds being so prevalent these days, has it at all changed the way you guys approach songwriting?
OC: In terms of the songwriting process, not really. We often make decisions in the studio where… well, we don’t worry about much, but if we do worry it’s that something sounds too much like something else or it’s too referential or too pastiche- pastiche meaning too much towards being a reenactment of a certain sound. We’re not always trying to skew things and trying to make something interesting constantly, but we’re keen to not just do something that’s obvious, I suppose.
In terms of taking that attitude towards trying to stand out among your contemporaries, we don’t really worry about that because if you’re constantly trying to stand out or try to step away from something, then you’re constantly chasing your own shadow and running away from yourself. These might be obvious things to say, but we just try and do something that excites us. Were we to be, perhaps, bored by the sounds we were hearing in contemporary music we might try to move away from that naturally rather than it be a conscious decision to stand out.
AP: The day of the UK election, you had the website change to a Drudge Report (or, in England, BBC) styled thing that sourced news articles and made the headlines misspell. What’s the story behind that?
OC: Well, it’s an obvious conceit taking something familiar and pushing it to where it doesn’t make sense, I suppose. Questioning trusting sources and perhaps things that might be a portal to information and corrupting that.
It wasn’t actually supposed to be sinister! It was supposed to be quite playful, but with the nature of news stories being a bit grim I suppose it did seem a little bit of a sideways thing to do! (laughs)
But yeah, I suppose it was just a fun thing in that in terms of the record, the way it looks and the title, as we tried to structure the album campaign and try to organize our upcoming tour we realized how much we’d say “that makes sense” or “how can we make this make sense.” It’s fun to do something that plays with that; basically something not making sense shakes you up, makes you question things.
AP: So the physical edition of the album has [through a bespoke printing process] something like 130,000 possible covers. You’re really trying to make things hard for collectors, aren’t you?
OC: Yeah, it’s not one for the completists I’d say! Unless they have a healthy bank balance and a lot of room to store things. (laughs)
It’s not supposed to undermine the idea of collecting though. I suppose it’s kind of dual purposes, in that it’s celebrating physical objects and the notion of collecting special objects and prizing them and enjoying them and being of importance and fun to look at, but also sort of undermining them by having everything be unique. It’s inadvertently playful that way, which we enjoyed.
They look good en masse, which is a bit of an irony as it’s unlikely people will see them en masse. You might catch them in a record store altogether, but most people who buy it will probably buy it online and see only one of them. They’re quite fun to see altogether, though, because you start to see differences through the familiarity of the collection.
It’s an exciting idea that we kind of toyed with in the past but it was too mind boggling, but we were lucky that (producer) Nick Ralph and the guys at Domino were able to pull it together.
AP: I was really impressed with the light set-up you used in the “Huarache Lights” video. Is that a setup you’ll be bringing on tour with you?
OC: That was a collaboration between our friend Robert Bell and a friend of his who owned the lights. They’re actually from a market in South London. Rob created this light installation and then Joe scored scored some music to go with it and that relationship led to us using the setup in the video.
We’re looking into bringing it on tour. I wouldn’t say it’s fragile, but we’re looking into ways of making it so it could travel as an exhibit or form part of our live show in the future. We kind of like the way that it operates- it’s just the shells of the lamps with projections on them. They’re sort of lights that aren’t lights and shades that aren’t shades, which is a fun idea. We’re trying to see if it will translate into a live touring setup, so it’s possible it could come to a city near you soon!
Hot Chip hits the House of Blues tonight, 6/04. Tickets are still available here. They will also be playing Governors Ball on Sunday, 6/07.