Tortoise and Hot Chip. Saturday, June 16, at The Granada
Reviewed by Andy Vihstadt
Hot Chip and Tortoise seemed like an unlikely combination, but a very welcome one when faced with the sweltering heat on Saturday night. Instrumental-rock requires very little movement from its listeners.
To be honest, I’ve never quite acquired a taste for Tortoise, although I did enjoy watching the massive video screen during the Chicago band's lengthy set, which continuously looped trippy computerized visuals. Meanwhile, girls in the background could be heard saying, “When are they going to be done? I’m ready to shake my ass!”
It was hot enough at The Granada Saturday for this dude from Tortoise to break a sweat just by playing xylophone. Photo by Scott Spychalski.
By the time Hot Chip hit the stage, the Granada had turned into a hot, sticky who’s who of body odor. The London outfit, whose sophomore album The Warning was nominated for last year’s Mercury Music Prize, looked just like I had envisioned: Five nerdy middle-aged white guys bouncing robotically behind a barricade of synthesizers and sequencers. Frontman Alexis Taylor (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Kip from Napoleon Dynamite), positioned himself behind a keyboard and set of bongos.
The band threw a good amount of unreleased material into the set, including the recently recorded “Shake a Fist,” but the audience (particularly the interpretive dance mosh pit that had formed to my right) took to the new songs with the same energy as expected crowd-pleasers like “Boy From School” and “Over and Over.”
Yes, Hot Chip is proficient in shaking asses, but the real marvel was Taylor’s fragile Thom-Yorke-meets-Gene-Ween delivery, which seemed perfectly at home with the indie-pop act’s amped up live versions, transcending even the most oppressive of temperatures.
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ha. it's cool. i was a bit of a passing Tortoise fan prior to the show (owned some records, but couldn't tell you who was who), so I had to do some googling to realize that was John Herndon. He looked like some trucker dude they just pulled off the street to me until I put that greasy mop from the show next to the one dude I swore I never saw on stage in the promo pics.
Thanks for standing up for Tortoise, Greg, and for identifying the xylophone -- whoops, I mean vibrophone -- man. Honestly just looking at that picture, I didn't know how the hell I was going to set about Googling the guy to find out who he was in an efficient amount of time. Then I became distracted by a piece of lint and stared at the floor for three hours.
Tortoise was great. They were a welcome parallel to the processed 5 keyboard attack of Hot Chip. Don't get me wrong; I dug Hot Chip a lot, but it was cool to see something with a similar parallel to HC, but much more organic, as a predecessor. I thought the lineup was perfectly matched and really nicely complimentary for people who weren't just there to dance or just there to feel a bit more subtle groove.
Also, a quick google search would've told you the sweaty vibrophone man in the photo above is John Herndon, who more than earned his keep playing drums for Tortoise for the majority of their set.
If I had been laying in bed I would have enjoyed Tortoise more. By the time Hot Chip finally went on, I was almost too tired to listen...luckily they woke my ass up. I was really impressed. Can't wait to see them again.
Was not as hot as the STG/ Rapture show...but still, I was forced next door to get icecream.
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