Hot Chip

You get the feeling that everyone who’s anyone in Edinburgh was out for this show. It wasn’t just a big gig, it was one by a band whose new album One Life Stand has set the benchmark for crossover electronic pop style in ‘10. Did it live up to its own billing? Probably not.

It goes without saying that Hot Chip are a fabulous and unique band, and that their finest moments will be on the defining soundtrack of the last half decade or so. Yet not everything they do is touched by greatness, and the set’s definitive moments were over pretty early. Did anyone else wonder, once ‘Ready For the Floor’, ‘One Life Stand’ and ‘Over and Over’ had been played back-to-back and the set was barely half over, where the modishly geeked-out sextet could go from there? A first public live play for the gorgeous ‘Brothers’ was appreciated, and ‘Take It In’, ‘I Feel Better’ and ‘No Fit State’ are all vintage samples of loafer-wearing techno. But this is a band who are only occasionally perfect, rather than routinely so. Which, in all fairness, is better than most.