Harvest Festival by Joe Goddard
LABEL: Greco Roman

So if you’re a Hot Chip fan looking to Joe Goddard’s big solo debut with high hopes that he’ll be turning out an album jammed to the gills with quirky electro pop and goofy lyrics that will make you laugh (but not out loud), you’re only going to be about 50% disappointed. Or maybe 50% enthused depending on your general outlook on life.

Basically, what you need to know straight away is that there’s a lot of really killer beat work on this thing and lyrics are, with only a handful of exceptions, completely absent from Harvest Festival. A touch surprising, maybe, but definitely not a problem.

The album’s pleasantly hypnotic opening salvo, “Apple Bobbing,” is immediately reminiscent of a slightly less mathematically precise, mid-career Underworld track. And that’s a good thing, actually. There’s more life, more heart, more satisfying irregularity and by the end of the tune, it’s going to be really tough not to start digging through your closet in search of that forgotten Second Toughest in the Infants CD.

“If ‘Tinned Apricot’ and its pelvic thrusting synth bass doesn’t make you feel like head banging with a hot dog hanging from your lips like a cigar, there’s clearly something very wrong with you.”

But just as your joyous mental reunion with Karl Hyde is kicking into overdrive, Goddard shifts gears and dunks your face into a bucket of Mr. Oizo’s hilarious and forever lovable “Flat Beat” circa 1999. If “Tinned Apricot” and its pelvic thrusting synth bass doesn’t make you feel like head banging with a hot dog hanging from your lips like a cigar, there’s clearly something very wrong with you.

Where the first third of the album is mostly fun instrumentals that could make a dance floor shimmy and shake under the proper circumstances, by the time you reach “Go Bananas” it’s likely a fog machine and strobe lights will have spontaneously materialized in your living room. Put it this way, if you’re currently a European club DJ and you haven’t yet spliced the track’s fist pumping vocals into this weekend’s setlist, YOU’RE NOT DOING YOUR JOB, CHIEF. 

“...the whole scenario is connected by a low hum vocal that sets the entire track (beautifully) ablaze.”

The album’s finest hour (or more accurately, 3:48) is “Lemon & Lime (Home Time)” and it’s due to the fact that all of the album’s beautiful knob twiddling and perfectly programmed beats finally get the opportunity to ride our beloved Hot Chip vocal monotone to the promised land. Warm textures are punctuated by bits of what sounds like a synthesized steel drum and the whole scenario is connected by a low hum vocal that sets the entire track (beautifully) ablaze. 

Is it important to note that every song on Harvest Festival has some sort of fruit themed title? Probably not. Honestly, each piece seems pretty thinly connected to its produce inspired nomenclature. “Tinned Apricot” is permeated by a winding, metallic groove. “Pineapple Chunks” is, well, thoroughly chunky.

But it’s probably important in that it proves Goddard, like his Hot Chip buddies, has a really wonderful sense of humor. The whole album is fun from the first note and if you’re not smiling or bobbing your head or sweating it out on the dancefloor, you’re probably a cold, heartless robot sent back from the future on a mission to critically condemn all of our planet’s most fun dance-hybrid albums.  


REVIEWED BY ALEC BRINEGAR
ALEC'S 3 FAVORITE TRACKS: “Apple Bobbing” • “Tinned Apricot” • “Lemon & Lime (Home Time)”


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