To whatever readers I have,

Sorry about the lack of updates around here. I thought it would be easier to start and maintain a blog during winter break, when I have nothing to do, but what I’ve found is that winter break just brings all intellectual and physical activity to a grinding halt in order to make room for tons and tons of socializing, sleeping, and eating. I think I’ll be much more inclined to write and post when I’m back at school and back in the swing of things.

In any case, this isn’t any of the posts promised last time, it’s more of an emergency alert that the new Hot Chip record is, just like their previous two full-lengths, truly great. “Made in the Dark” is yet another album that is in turns playful and morose. The beats and grooves are airtight as always, and the group maintains their proclivity for both buzzing, galvanizing hooks and elegiac swaths of delicate melody. The electronic attack that seizes “Shake a Fist” halfway through is a definite highlight, but the group really hits their stride with the “We’re Looking for a Lot of Love.” The track continues the strain of agonized, cracked balladry that they perfected with “Crap Kraft Dinner,” the thematic centerpiece of their debut LP “Coming on Strong,” and continued with “Look After Me” on 2006’s “The Warning.”

“We’re Looking for a Lot of Love” is all funereal organ, tape hiss, digitally clipped falsetto choir, and soft percussion as its throbbing melody kicks in. Vocalist Alexis Taylor plods through the first verse, hushed and sullen, before skittering beats and plucked guitar notes anticipate the lovely chorus: “Every time that we walk the streets/ I try my best to keep up with the beat/ You’re everything that I never could keep/ I hear the sound and it starts to repeat.” These words, and their attendant massive synth washes, fade into a sea of pristine whistling. The song’s muted beats get ever more tangled as the song’s form repeats and finally drifts into a sparse, bleak bridge before returning to the hook, plaintive and resigned as ever.

This chorus beautifully describes the way music is not so much a metaphor for love and life as its completely inseparable fabric. I’ve always loved Hot Chip’s first record for the way that it drapes itself in vacant, seemingly ironic references to contemporary hip-hop and R&B, yet uses these as a motif to a channel a dark yet gently humorous (and very ’00s) brand of youthful malaise. “We’re Looking for a Lot of Love,” then, is a song that strips this technique of its pop-cultural baggage to its skeletal, desperate truth.

The song is remarkable, an early contender for the finest on the record, and may yet eclipse the immaculately idiosyncratic beauty of 2005’s “From Drummer to Driver” to become Hot Chip’s single greatest track. Yet the whole album, and really the band’s whole catalog, is an embarrassment of riches. More tuneful and more willfully addictive than really anything in the mainstream, Hot Chip nonetheless defy the “pop” categorization — their music is too rich with surprises and wrinkles in places that radio pop never hides its eccentricities. Yet to call them “indie” would be a precarious and possibly embarassing choice for any band of the last 5 years working within that label, since none of them could ever dream of getting anywhere close to this level of invention, playfulness, and general excellence. Utterly unique and relentlessly delightful, Hot Chip have cranked out yet another LP of evidence that they are, far and away, the funniest, finest, and most prescient band of the 2000s.