Hot Hot Heat has an album that survives beyond its hype. Since the big music magazines bestowed the “the” bands — The Vines, The Strokes, The Hives, The White Stripes — as the theoretical Moseses who would lead the rock nations out of the desert of musically slim nothings, the shoes and egos of these Mick Jagger and Keith Richards posers have been hard to fill — not to mention stomach.
The group’s first full-length release “Make up the Breakdown” from the Seattle-based Sub Pop Records delivers a striking counterpoint to all these new garage bands.
Hot Hot Heat still echoes the typical collocation of ’60s and ’70s avant-rock, but with ’80s new wave and the synth-rock influence of Devo in its arsenal, the band strays from the pack.
The album also siphons the authority of Elvis Costello, The Cure and even Pulp, but the band manages to pack its punch in three-minute masterpieces much the same way Weezer does — just minus the repetitious hooks and bland song structure.
Where Rivers Cuomo and company generally implement standard verse-chorus-verse songwriting, Hot Hot Heat tends to be more laissez-faire to this textbook approach and can produce somewhat grandiose build-ups and breakdowns all in the time it takes to make microwave popcorn.
The group’s first single, “Bandages” is a prime example. In three and a half minutes the group swings from an organ-filled euro-rock intro reminiscent of Clinic to erratically sung vocals like, “These bandages cover more than scrapes/ Cuts and bruises from regrets and mistakes,” all the while shifting the melodic tension from passionate to belligerent. It’s slightly more complicated, but Weezer could stand to take some notes.
Another asset of Hot Hot Heat’s sound is singer Steve Bays’ vocal capabilities. His voice is an instrument all its own. His quasi-British Colombian brogue is a steadfast merger of Pulp front man Jarvis Cocker and Cure singer Robert Smith — quietly chaotic, confident and resourcefully soup du jour. Bays is able to mold his vocal mood to parallel the miscellaneous backdrop the band paints him.
Whether it is the austere “In Cairo,” downtrodden with morose piano and hushed bass and guitars, or the synth-rock upbeat tempo of “No, Not Now,” Bays uses his instrument to meet the needs of the piece from yielding glumness to visceral elation.
“In Cairo” is the most estranged song on the LP, culling the likes of Coldplay, to which it is of great wonder how that band never wrote the song. Nevertheless, Hot Hot Heat delivers the song with sure hands, and the tune strikes the imagination that this could be where they are moving toward conceptually and musically.
Hot Hot Heat is not the savior of rock ‘n’ roll — that’s Radiohead’s job — but they never claimed to be either. There are weak links on “Make up the Breakdown,” such as some pseudo-lame lyrics like “You got to save us/ S-O-S/ I’m out of gas/ I’m out out of touch/ shipwrecked ferry/ marry me /or take me out to lunch,” that Bays sings on “Save Us S.O.S.”
Lyric writing like that can be saved from the throes of oblivion on future recordings, but this album is definitely a fabergé egg, deft in a musical collage among the plain clothes rock of the “the” culture.