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In outward appearance, Hot Chip is a fairly unremarkable indie band. None of the band's five musicians bring much in the way of charisma or showmanship or fashion sense or any of the things that typically suck in us style-obsessed gays. They wear their T-shirts and button-downs, play and sing, maybe bob their heads a bit, and that's that.
Yet these unassuming Londoners have a way of whipping audiences into a froth that's far from ordinary. At their Fillmore show last week, the feeling in the crowd was more like San Francisco's early raves than the stand-and-stare vibe engendered by the usual rock shows. Hot Chip does play guitars: There was at least one of those in action during most of the set, although Al Doyle and Owen Clarke (the token babe) swapped guitar, bass, and synths throughout. But the pair played them as if they were keyboards to present an intricate electro-psychedelic throb as the four front Chips stand in a Kraftwerk-like row while the fifth, Felix Martin, dutifully mans his drum machines in the center back. Only Joe Goddard, the one with the deep counterpart voice and stubbly chipmunk cheeks, makes movements that could be considered in any way rocking out.
Starting with the jerky "Shake a Fist," the quintet ignited a thick, shifting groove that -- despite influences like Prince that they enthusiastically flaunt -- manages to sound startlingly unique in a current indie scene packed with aspiring disco-punks. Paradoxically, one of the things Hot Chip did so well Thursday night was to start a track as a roots-revealing cover version and then seamlessly segue into one of its own: Bespectacled singer Alexis Taylor (above) began "And I Was a Boy From School" as a poignant dance take on Big Star's '70s power-pop cult favorite "Thirteen;" an encore of "No Fit State" started out as New Order's rousing dance-rock classic "Temptation," and an anthemic sing-along version of "Nothing Compares 2 U" by The Family/Sinéad O'Connor/Prince gave way to Hot Chip's closing ballad "In the Privacy of Our Love."
Like at the recent SF concert by the very gay/lesbian Magnetic Fields, it was tough to figure out who in the Hot Chip audience was gay and who was not. This is of course confounded by the band, which is straight, but sang in the concert favorite "Ready For the Floor" its most memorable and harmony-drenched lyric -- "You're my number one guy" -- without a shred of ambiguity. As an English dance act, it's entirely fitting that Hot Chip would put a gay twist on a sweet seduction song that's played out on a club floor: Brits typically respect the subcultural sources of their music scenes, and take great pride in exhuming them. What even more intriguing is how queer the international indie scene is turning, how indie we gays are getting, and how two tribes that have been fairly antithetical for ages are now overlapping into a complicatedly sexy mass. It would take a lot more space than I have here to map it all out, but I'm sure that this phenomenon had a lot to do with why Hot Chip's show was so euphoric. We're feeling the power of our influence just like in the glory days of '70s disco and androgynous '80s pop, and the indie world -- whether they know it or not -- is definitely feeling us.
-- BARRY WALTERS
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