Hot Chip - Dancing in the Dark EP

Hopefully you were either too young or too disinterested in MTV back when the worst song in the Springsteen catalog, ‘Dancing in the Dark’, was being played on the TV every 20 minutes. Then perhaps you wouldn’t be as jaded as I am concerning a cover of this song.

The video has a glossy 80s sheen to the stage production, Bruce is dressed up like a longshoreman from the Village People, and he was singing an inane dance-pop song to Courteney Cox (Soon to be a Friends alumni and Botox user), who’s "little world" as Bruce described it, was falling apart. The spotlight shined on her adoring smile, and Bruce made the transition to huge commercial entity in the span of a single song. It was the worst piece of shit I had ever seen. 

So when Hot Chip, a modern electronic equivalent of New Order (Excluding the latest New Order album, that blows away all the imitators…), decided to do a cover, I was intrigued.

In short, it’s better than the original.  Alexis Taylor’s gentle passive voice sounds truer to the inane and silly lyrics (I’m just sittin’ here tryin’ to write this book…I need a love reaction…) Fuck me.  But you have to give Hot Chip credit if they do indeed cover this song often in concert, the layers of electronica elevate the song far above the original and with all five or six musicians jamming it out, the synth-pop mix should be a hit.  As for the rest of the EP, the versions of the best songs on their last album,  ‘Huarache Lights’ and ‘Cry for You’, don’t really expand much beyond the originals, but should satiate their seemingly growing audience prone to purchase a remix.