HOT HOT HEAT
Elevator
Warner
· What Sloan’s One Chord to Another should have been – a great mid-fi party album
I kept waiting for Elevator to stop halfway up. In the past, Hot Hot Heat have usually only been good for six songs at a time. Not surprisingly, their six-song EP for Sub Pop was fantastic, but when it came time to release a full-length, Make Up the Breakdown ran out of steam early on.
To be fair, the duds on that album weren’t that bad, and the hits were freaking amazing, so the band picked up great reviews, made big waves in the U.K. and landed a lucrative contract with Warner. Now they return with Elevator and (to push this metaphor as far as it can go) it’s clear they are going nowhere but up. The album may start off rocky with "Running Out of Time" cribbing melodies from Cole Porter, but when they gear up for "Goodnight Goodnight," with its bouncy bass lines, hand claps and rock-solid chorus, Victoria’s new-wave sons are ready to dispel any major-label trash talking.
The band’s whiplash jerk guitars are still in full effect as is Steve Bays’s run-at-the-mouth vocals, but Elevator ties all the elements together better than ever before. The band still owes a huge debt to Elvis Costello, but seeing as they draw from his "Pump it Up" era rather than his pumping Diana Krall phase, there really isn’t anything to complain about. Bays is still turning phrases on a dime, but his melodies are more decisive. Whether he is smiling through hatred or winkingly delivering double negatives, Elevator gives the impression of time taken, but never comes off as being too smart for its own good.
This album isn’t the second coming, it’s not even the second coming of Nirvana (the best example of a Sub Pop band making the major label leap), but Elevator is so much fun to listen to that it won’t surprise me if it’s pumping from stereos all summer – in fact, I hope it is.
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