Ultimately, One Life Stand prevails as a huge swirling musical embrace about love in all its various forms. With a notable shift toward a soulful house-influenced sound, the album blossoms with a slew of highly romantic dance-ballads that nimbly fuse the acoustic with the electronic. From the piano-driven live drums and techno-manipulations of “Hand Me Down Your Love,” to the majestic string arrangements and Kanye-worthy auto-tune of “I Feel Better,” nearly every song is a paradigm of brilliantly rendered contrast. Reigning supreme is lead singer Alexis Taylor’s chimerical falsetto, which soars lithely over everything, occasionally complemented by the cavernous undertones of co-vocalist Joe Goddard. These vocal collaborations are most notable in the songs that explore alternative figurations of love, such as the fraternal harmonizing of “Brothers” and the spindly little maternally-minded gem “Alley Cats”—a song about “when you're feeling something that you really love is coming to an end, and saying that's not really possible.”
The album hits its stride with the pulsating title track. "One Life Stand" opens with a ridiculously catchy beat and some ominous-sounding electronic noise. Lyrically, it evolves from rather trivializing opening verses (“Tell me what you're playing”) into an intensely heartfelt and downright cuddly chorus (“I only wanna be your one life stand/ Tell me do you stand by your whole man?”) that showcases the best of Taylor’s vocal abilities and encapsulates the album’s overarching theme. As Taylor explained in a November 2009 interview with Pitchfork, “I'm talking about turning a one night stand into someone's whole life…and I think that's quite a nice thing to say.” And he’s right; it is quite nice, and a refreshing sentiment in today’s cynical world. Like that now-infamous YouTube video of the wedding where everybody dances up the aisle in sunglasses, “One Life Stand” manages to sound simultaneously classic and fresh while still giving you that old warm fuzzy feeling.
The most dubious turn comes with “Slush,” in which This Heat drummer Charles Hayward plays and sings harmony. Taylor describes Hayward’s role as “one of the most special things about the album… because he's someone that I really look up to and love,” but the song drags and vacillates in its redundant lack of beats, becoming the kind of track that most will end up skipping after a listen or two. However, its ultimate value is revealed around the 4:30 mark with a belated transition into the profound repetition of “Don’t I know there is a God?” which serves to round out the album’s trifecta of love—romantic, familial, and divine.
In light of past endeavors, the unexpected seriousness of this album paired with the often-saccharine lyrics (“I only want one want night/ Together in our arms/ This is the longest night/ We’re meeting arms to arms”) may tempt some to write it off as simply Hot Chip’s latest bout of sarcasm. And yet, amidst such earnest delivery and luminous cohesion, doing so would feel just plain wrong. Rather, One Life Stand reveals how the band has mellowed out without selling out, matured without losing what makes them unique. There’s really something for everybody here, but the overall message seems to be that love is all around, even here, even now, and Hot Chip’s ability to express this sentiment without sounding completely lame stands as a testament to both their inherent coolness and their expectation-defying talent.
Grade: A-
Review by Hilary Cadigan
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