HOT CHIP Schallplatten & CDs

Review: A warm welcome back to perennial genre-benders Hot Chip, who return to stores after three long years with their eighth album, some 21 years after making their debut. Freakout/Release is no dramatic change in direction, but instead a further distillation of what has always made the band so appealing - a trademark fusion of synth-pop, loved-up house sounds, lilting and sometimes melancholic lead vocals, loose-limbed organic drums, nods to Prince and an ability to craft killer hooks. There are highlights aplenty, from the gravelly live hip-hop funk of 'The Evil That Men Do' (where rapper Cadence Weapon delivers a star turn) and the subtly post-punk influenced, saucer-eyed brilliance of 'Hard To Be Funky' (featuring Lou Hayter), to the classic Hot Chip sing-along flex of 'Time' and the krautrock-tinged 'Out of My Depth'.

Review: Hot Chip continue to occupy a unique space in British music. Yet despite their standing as a bunch of polymaths just as at home with pure pop as experimental diversions, what continues to truly separate them from all or any contemporaries is a rich melancholy to their sound, and it's this which looms pleasantly large on 'Why Make Sense'. The songwriting of Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard has never sounded sharper, not their beat-driven yet tastefully spare sound more addictive. Now as ever, no-one can reconcile human emotion and machine-like rhythm in quite the same fashion as this maverick outfit.