Music

Coachella Week: 5 thoughts from Thursday’s Hot Chip show

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Hot Chip played its first-ever Las Vegas Show at Cosmopolitan’s Boulevard Pool on April 18.
Photo: Erik Kabik/erikkabik.com

1. Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden has a catalog filled with interesting electronic compositions (see: 2003’s Rounds, for example), so it’s disappointing he’s opening Thursday’s show at the Cosmopolitan’s Boulevard Pool with a DJ set. Few in the late-arriving crowd even seem to realize the background-y sounds are anything more than a pre-show playlist, evidenced by the utter lack of applause (as in, not a single person claps or cheers) when Hebden finishes and leaves the stage.

2. And the award for best pre-set song ever goes to … Hot Chip, for arriving onstage to Harold Faltermeyer’s theme song from Fletch. Fun and fitting. I’ll have a steak sandwich … and a steak sandwich.

3. Smallish crowds and unseasonably cool temperatures aren’t ideal ingredients for a pool-deck dance party. The synthy U.K. band’s typically high-energy production feels a bit muted in its first-ever Vegas visit tonight, far from the full-on fan wildness I witnessed at Hot Chip’s 2007 and 2010 Coachella performances.

4. On the flipside, the sound tonight is crisp and clear, a positive development following reports that 1. Hot Chip’s Saturday Weekend 1 set at Coachella 2013 lacked dynamics and 2. volume has been low for some of the Cosmo’s Coachella week shows. Tonight’s music could be louder still, but sonic issues are at a minimum.

5. The show’s musical highlight comes midway through, when Hot Chip segues from “Flutes” into “Over and Over.” The first, a building seven-minute cut off 2012 album In Our Heads finally puts most bodies in motion, and the transition into the latter, the 2006 hit that put the group on the map, is sly and subtle.

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