Similarly their brand of heavily percussive electro-edged shuffle incites, without ever inducing motional conduct: opener Mercy features the treble-soused guitars that routinely shape Hot Chip sets (a nod to the almighty Prince influence inferred quite explicitly throughout Coming On Strong) as it jitters slinkily to King Sunny Adé-ish rhythms whilst Medication, "a short song about pharmaceuticals", features a bulbous funk bass line that protrudes from kitsch '80s-indebted chorus. As such, treading the thread-like line between improvisational afrobeat jive and analog modulation New Build shack up, somewhat inevitably, somewhere or other in between Alexis Taylor's About Group and Joe Goddard's The 2 Bears without ever expressing the progressive guile of either. Do You Not Feel Loved? stuffs gently euphoric house palpitations down the agape gob of a monstrous four-to-the-floor throb that, when intertwined with live steel pans, is elevated above otherwise unremarkable A-list fodder evocative of that excreted by the vainglorious Elliot Gleave and, despite similarly recalling both the impulsive arm-aloft menace of I Feel Better and the glitchy buoyancy of Ready For The Floor, it's almost excessively leaden. With Doyle flanked by dual percussionists, the Hot Chip/ LCD Soundsystem cohort becomes the self-professed "man with the microphone" as he spasmodically conducts cluttered stage with an emphatic whisk of his guitar. However it's when Doyle's without such a shield and is consequently unable to inject any free funk infusion that things turn awkward as on the otherwise engaging Schism of the Mind when he turns to either superfluously pat a bongo or superficially tune up.
And although Misery Loves Company thunders along to a sprightly bass/ kick drum combo redolent of sketchy, robust early DFA outpour, whilst Hot Chip may, hugely laudably, have remained at the foreground of contemporary British pop New Build, although now "seven years in the making", are already in dire need of renovation so that they may embark on constructing a more concrete identity. For if such evident decay goes neglected they risk crumbling into the background as swiftly as tonight's set comes and goes.
