Hot Chip and Tortoise
Tortoise and Hot Chip. Saturday, June 16, at The Granada
Reviewed by Andy Vihstadt
Hot Chip and Tortoise seemed like an unlikely combination, but a very welcome one when faced with the sweltering heat on Saturday night. Instrumental-rock requires very little movement from its listeners.
To be honest, I’ve never quite acquired a taste for Tortoise, although I did enjoy watching the massive video screen during the Chicago band's lengthy set, which continuously looped trippy computerized visuals. Meanwhile, girls in the background could be heard saying, “When are they going to be done? I’m ready to shake my ass!”
It was hot enough at The Granada Saturday for this dude from Tortoise to break a sweat just by playing xylophone. Photo by Scott Spychalski.
By the time Hot Chip hit the stage, the Granada had turned into a hot, sticky who’s who of body odor. The London outfit, whose sophomore album The Warning was nominated for last year’s Mercury Music Prize, looked just like I had envisioned: Five nerdy middle-aged white guys bouncing robotically behind a barricade of synthesizers and sequencers. Frontman Alexis Taylor (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Kip from Napoleon Dynamite), positioned himself behind a keyboard and set of bongos.
The band threw a good amount of unreleased material into the set, including the recently recorded “Shake a Fist,” but the audience (particularly the interpretive dance mosh pit that had formed to my right) took to the new songs with the same energy as expected crowd-pleasers like “Boy From School” and “Over and Over.”
Yes, Hot Chip is proficient in shaking asses, but the real marvel was Taylor’s fragile Thom-Yorke-meets-Gene-Ween delivery, which seemed perfectly at home with the indie-pop act’s amped up live versions, transcending even the most oppressive of temperatures.
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