1) Take Care; 2) The Beach Party; 3) Keep Fallin’; 4) Playboy; 5) Crap Kraft Dinner; 6) Down with Prince; 7) Bad Luck; 8) You Ride, We Ride, in My Ride; 9) Shining Escalade; 10) Baby Said; 11) One One One
Geek r'n'b. All you need to know.
Key tracks: "Playboy", "Crap Kraft Dinner", "Baby Said"
As far as first impressions go, this has got to be one of the more surreal ones. Early Hot Chip in general had a bit of a bizarre feel to them, given the band were intentionally playing up to the “wise-ass nerd romantics” image they had and a result stood out from the crowd by emphasising their complete non-machoness. But Coming on Strong is still a surreal album even coming from that context, especially as a debut album. Imagine a group of pasty white nerds having grown up on gangsta rap and smooth R'n'B, using these as a thematic launchpad for their bedroom music experiments while simultaneously being both earnest about it and, realising the inherent absurdity of it, taking the mick out of themselves and the concept. Here we have Alexis Taylor getting sick of motherfuckers and jerk-off losers with his frail falsetto and Joe Goddard longing for his boo and trying to act like the coolest guy in the hood while he’s rolling around in his twenty-inch rimmed car, while the music straddles a thin line between oddball, off-kilter amateur experiments and genuinely soulful, emotional songwriting.
Arguably Coming on Strong’s sound is a more significant reason to listen to it than the actual songs, because its sonic thematics are its most distinguishable feature. The tone of the album is part decidedly quirky and part early uncertainty on where to go and how to get there. The latter is even more detectable in the actual songs themselves: Hot Chip were still testing waters at this point in that department and it’s pretty clear even from a cursory look. It’s probably better to talk about Coming on Strong as a series of rather good moments separated by a lot of very similar low-key, home-spun mid-tempo synth pop. It’s not without its charms but it is without any major hooking points, especially for anyone coming into the album after the rather hook-tastic later albums. The album tries a lot – most songs will have some sort of focal musical part that nests in your head if you give it a chance – but rarely succeeds to the level that you’d start thinking its main draw is in its songs rather than the gangsta nerd ambience.
But Coming on Strong isn’t without its more complete merits. The lead (and only) single “Playboy” more or less sums up the entire album within its five and a half minutes: you’ll get the moody minimalist beats, Taylor’s quiet whispering and the bonkers swagger bragger ‘tude all over the album, but here they’re all together and in the best form as they’ll get, almost as if this song came before everything else and the band then decided to extend the idea for an entire album. On the whole other end is “Baby Said” which, conveniently for a song so near the end of the album, links the Hot Chip here to what would come next. It’s lighter and airier than anything else here, with a catchy pop singalong finale where the band suddenly stumble onto the makings of what would inspire a good chunk of the rest of their career. “Crap Kraft Dinner”, the best song on the album, is on the other hand simply a really good tune. It drops the pretense and roleplay completely and goes in a strikingly more wistful direction, properly debuting the band’s trademark soulfulness and revealing their heart. It’s a simple song, consisting of two halves made up of repeating the same part over and over again, but both parts are excellent in their own right and combined they form a heart-grasper of a song. Under its off-kilter name lies a sublime thing of beauty.
Those three songs are the musical anchor points that Coming on Strong relies on. While some of the rest of its songs are better than others (“Down With Prince” and the dance anthem lite “You Ride, We Ride, in My Ride” have a certain quirky groove to them that raises the bar slightly), the disappointing truth is that Coming on Strong is more a strong curio than a strong album. It’s arguably far better if you come to it with the hindsight of someone who’s already familiar with the rest of the discography – the added knowledge of what the group really are like allows you to enjoy the oddness without thinking this is all there is to the group’s music, and makes it doubly so fascinating and endearing. But remove it from its context and it’s even less noteworthy than with the safety net of the band’s history underneath it. I’ll be the first one to admit that it’s still an enjoyable thing to listen through, but at the end of the day the songs pale in comparison to what anyone’s come to expect from Hot Chip.
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