Hot Chip

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Amazon

One of the biggest pleasures of listening to Hot Chip is their delicious Britishness—that beat-you-up-with-perfect-English quality that hits playfulness and abandon buttons simultaneously. That’s a thin line the group’s honed on club hits over three albums, and while they have brought similar sensibility to remixes of other artists (notably recently Caribou’s “She’s the One” and the Matthew Dear track “Don & Sherri”), it’s been more difficult for other producers to retain that mischievous aspect on remixes of Hot Chip songs. The remixes of “Hold On” and “Touch Too Much” on this new remix EP likewise put paid to Hot Chip’s original plans for these standouts from Made in the Dark. Switch, sought after producer post-Santogold, turns out two almost opposite remixes of “Hold On” (the funky, electro-basslined LDN remix is better) that are slickly stylish but lack the punch of an obvious dancefloor killer. Ewan Pearson, however, is reliably confident in his re-interpretation of “Touch Too Much”. Over the course of nine minutes, Pearson throws in trademark Rapture-esque beats, spacey synth washes and glockenspiel accents; the floating melancholia momentarily recalls why “Boy from School” was so successful for the band. But as a whole the EP has the feeling of a thrown together, friends-with-the-band effort—it serviceably represents conventional reinterpretations of originally captivating songs, but never approaches that rapturous sense of rediscovery that the best remixes bring.

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