HOT GOSSIP - You Look Faster When You Are Young

Hot Gossip are back, the Varese-based trio that had already drawn a fair amount of attention with their solid debut "Angles" (an apt title), dating back to 2006. The new album is made up of twelve tracks that, taken together, document a fairly decisive consolidation of the band's sound, alongside a broadening of its stylistic vocabulary. In essence, Hot Gossip set off from post-punk and arrive back at post-punk, but along this disjointed, circular route they manage to bump into just about everything: from a stammering, harebrained form of hardcore poised between Fugazi and Minutemen, to a slightly daft, ramshackle garage punk, frequently passing through funk syncopations (somewhere between Strokes, early Liars and Rapture) with a vaguely dazed gait, all of it filtered almost constantly through the distorting lens of a healthy goofball streak, which makes for a more enjoyable listen (an aspect we imagine comes even more to life in their live performances).

The band's songwriting remains fairly terse and ossified, built on rhythmic contortions and sudden shifts, somewhere between epileptic and puppet-like. Perhaps there's no single track that stands out decisively above the rest (the riff of "You Better Know", maybe?), but the album holds together well as a whole, coming across as a progression of rhythmic exercises, now more frantic, now more subdued. The vaguely rockabilly experiment of "At Night" is interesting, as is the neurotic wave gymnastics of the opening one-two, but it's on tracks like "Call The Rangers" that the band's shape-shifting irony delivers one of the happiest outcomes of its devilish showmanship: the bass carves out a little beat march seasoned with whistling melodies, which then crumples into an improbable chorus that sounds more than anything like the scream of a suicidal hairdryer as it falls into a bathtub. Elsewhere they deconstruct Clash ("What We Are") or flirt, more or less knowingly, with a machine-gun college power-rock very much in the style of old Weezer. "Father" provisionally closes the discussion, hinting at a somewhat skittish, ungrammatical style of writing that is by now fairly recognizable.

Hot Gossip thus put together their own personal toolbox for a bold exercise in sonic bricolage, in which vague, imprecise ideas about more or less everything end up crammed together: this is undoubtedly the greatest strength of "You Look Faster When You Are Young", but also somewhat its limitation. Still, the record has its fine moments and ultimately wins you over. The test of the second album, then, is passed without major hitches.

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11/03/2009