hot chip, or why i should have worn comfy shoes.

Ok, I'll admit, I was highly skeptical of Devlin and Darko and Hot Chip tonight, at Highline. I really was. I heard good things from some reputable sources, but essentially it's not my cup of tea. I wasn't really familiar with a great deal of Hot Chip's stuff, so I figured I'd give them a chance, at the very least.

The performance essentially blew me away. It was peculiar; I wasn't really MOVED by any of the music, per se. But I had a fucking fun time. And during the whole thing, all I kept wondering is why, WHY are these bunch of guys who I would have mocked in high school standing on a stage and dictating to me how to be cool. And why was I listening?

The music was infectious. I've never seen so many white kids dancing in one place since everyone since the drunken dance to Usher's "Yeah" at my senior prom. And even then, they weren't ALL hipsters; you had your wankstas and your dance kids. But not at Hot Chip. No, no, no. This was an entirely different sort of dance experience. It rivalled Williamsburg for the collective amount of thick rimmed glasses and skinny grey jeans it boasted. Overall, seeing the barista that served me free trade coffee this morning shaking his hips in a VERY frenetic and somewhat pathetic fashion to electropopbeats is more than slightly disturbing.

Nonetheless, this makes me a hypocrite as I was doing the exact, same thing.

It felt like a throwback, essentially. Their shit's riddled with 80's technosounds and synthbeats. Had I closed my eyes and tried real, real hard, I might've deceived myself into thinking that Michael J. Fox had come and whisked me away in his Delorean. But the beauty of the whole thing was that there was something distinctly modern (or postmodern) about it, too. I can't quite put my finger on it yet; it may be that it was simply in the setting itself, and the people. Though the vocal performance was really of an unparalleled, unique sort. Three voices, three vocal ranges, three very different sounds. It might've been the touch that blasted the whole shebang into the 21st century. I can't be sure.

Devlin and Darko were somewhat typical, but fun, of course. And their sampling was phenomenal. It pushes them that extra step ahead, gives them something that no one else has (at least until another computer nerd with an extensive musical vocabulary comes along and takes that away from them).

Generally a pleasing show. I'm all danced and debauched out.