October 6, 2006

Hot Club De Paris: Drop It ’Till It Pops

Liverpool trio mould pop out of everything but the kitchen sink

7 / 10 On first inspection, madcap Liverpool threesome Hot Club De Paris sound like a Futureheads clone. Handy, since The Futureheads have moved on to their blue period and no longer sound much like The Futureheads. Yet from the second Hot Club ferociously channel the sea-shantyish spirit of early Coral on opener ‘Shipwreck’, ‘Drop It ’Till It Pops’ proves there’s more to them than that. For one, they’re the blackest white-boy schmindie band in the country, uploading a Snoop fixation into their spring-loaded punka pop; from the cheeky ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’ pun down to ‘Who Am I?’’s re-imagining of Snoop’s ‘Who Am I (What’s My Name)?’ in barbershop style. But even that’s not the whole story; of the more sombre moments, ‘Bonded By Blood (A Song For Two Brothers)’ is what would happen if The Mighty Boosh started human beatboxing over old trip-hop tracks. And then, when you realise how perfectly ‘Sometimesitsbetternottostickbitsofeachother
ineachotherforeachother’ bootlegs with Christina’s ‘Ain’t No Other Man’, you realise that Hot Club’s true raison d’être is to ram together as many far-flung genres into their Looney Tunes barbershop-pop as Xenomania’s most bonkers productions for Girls Aloud. With such a willingness to throw so much shit at the wall, not all of it sticks, but the really dazzling thing about Hot Club is that they manage all this with the boring old bass, drums and guitar set-up. When they decide which style they want to stick with, they could be unstoppable.

Dan Martin

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