Hot Chip Relearn 'One Life Stand' for the Stage

With recording and all the related tasks completed for Hot Chip's new album, 'One Life Stand,' the band faced just one more task before hitting the road this month: learning how to play the songs.

"We had to learn how the actual sequences go," multi-instrumentalist Al Doyle tells Spinner. It seems like the song structures are something the English electro-pop band would know intimately, having just finished the record. Turns out, though, that the band writes and records in piecemeal fashion.

"We usually have this thing where the songs get written and the album gets out and then we take the songs apart completely for the live show and relearn them and restructure them, and the instrumentation is different," Doyle says. "It's like covering your own songs, in a way."

Assembling songs out of the best bits sometimes means finding instrumental parts that aren't actually possible to play live. Also, though, the band likes to tinker with the songs so they really stand out onstage.

"We always try to make things sound as powerful as possible, and the live thing is really different," Doyle says. "It's more upfront and loud and distorted. I have no idea how this album is going to hold up -- I'm very excited to play it."

Although the songs on 'One Life Stand,' which is out now, got tagged early on as going in a more sedate than those on 2008's 'Made in the Dark,' Doyle says that's not where the record ended up.

"There are still some quite dancey, upfront songs on there," Doyle says. "Saying that it's calm or more laidback might make people think it's some weird ambient record or something like that. It's still verses and choruses, it just hasn't got those really wild moments of a record like 'Made in the Dark' or 'Bendable Posable.'"