Hot Chip - Made In The Dark

Describe Hot Chip to an indifferent friend in as few words as you can and you'll struggle, because all the usual tick-box tags fade as sharply as a goldfish's attention span when faced with a band as wilfully divergent as this one. Their first album, 2004's Coming On Strong, was largely dismissed by critics at the time as 'chill-out', that most career-staining of rubber stamps. So it took 2006's The Warning to alert the mainstream to Hot Chip's strident, infectious creativity.

Made In The Dark only ups the idiosyncratic ante, while adding a deeper thrust to their made-in-the-shed aesthetic. One Pure Thought embodies their crossover strategy, starting with a harsh, jarring guitar and a dark, stormy synth, before unexpectedly breaking into a booty-shaking beat. Elsewhere, Shake A Fist is a swirling blast of future-disco that just about gets away with that Todd Rundgren interlude, and the band's trade in after-hours copulation soundtracking resurfaces in soulful ditties like We're Looking For A Lot Of Love.

What prevents this from being incontestably exceptional, though, is the inclusion of one or two throwaway, whimsical tracks that should have been left on the drawing board. It may also fail to impact upon any one audience - indie kids or electro-heads - but, then again, often it's the music that falls between the formalistic cracks that's the most intriguing. [Nick Mitchell]