The profession retrospective is one thing of a misplaced artwork within the streaming period. However the indietronica establishment Sizzling Chip have tackled theirs with aplomb. True to type for a gaggle that balances earnestness with a finely honed deadpan sensibility, Pleasure in Repetition encases just a few emotional truths inside a self-deprecating title. The principle reference is the refrain of 2005’s “Over and Over,” the London quintet’s breakthrough single and defining hit. Extra broadly, the album title captures each the essence of dance music and Sizzling Chip’s penchant for borrowing: They nicked it from Prince.
To their credit score, Sizzling Chip by no means hid their money owed—they stated they had been down with Prince from the start. The band didn’t got down to be a dance-rock powerhouse that will remix the singles of half the Western world. “We didn’t have the manufacturing worth to do a Future’s Youngster-style present,” singer Alexis Taylor stated in 2016. “And but, that was the music that was thrilling to us. We weren’t referencing the custom of New Order or Depeche Mode.” They had been 5 younger multi-instrumentalists who shared an curiosity in Black pop and indie rock, a mixture that was rapidly turning into the default for a technology of hipsters. Their 2004 debut, Approaching Robust, was as overloaded because the pretend synth on the duvet: soul balladry and back-porch choosing, easy sax solos and tiny-desk techno. It was shaggy and languid and intimate, just like the Beta Band in the event that they had been into Angie Stone as a substitute of the Stone Roses.
Approaching Robust is the one Sizzling Chip album not represented right here, presumably as a result of it acquired the deluxe-reissue remedy final 12 months, or as a result of its muted, bedroom-to-blogroll aesthetic—to say nothing of its crazy-ass white-boy lyricism—would possibly slouch within the presence of sturdier firm. (It’s spiritually represented by “Take a look at The place We Are,” a Rodney Jerkins-style ballad from 2012 that’s solely R&B by technique of elimination.) The press materials describes this assortment as “much less a Greatest Of, extra like a Greatest Liked”—their hottest stay songs, in different phrases. (Solely studio recordings are included: no stay variations, and no remixes of their personal songs or others’.)The phrasing suggests one more, extra cynical riff on the title: the complacent viewers, craving extra of the identical.
However Sizzling Chip by no means fell into that lure, at the same time as they grew to become a pop commodity. Visiting his girlfriend in New York, Taylor occurred to run into James Murphy and Jonathan Galkin of DFA Information; Sizzling Chip signed with DFA quickly afterward. The transfer felt like a fait accompli on the time, and regardless that Taylor and Joe Goddard remained the band’s producers, 2006’s The Warning had the whiff of DFA’s astringent home model. Going ahead, Sizzling Chip’s timbres had been crisper, their mixes had been fuller, the saxes now skronked. Soul signifiers took a backseat to gurning electro, a sound the band metabolized with startling ease.
