Review: Hot Chip ****

A BUNCH of middle-aged men wearing deeply unfashionable clothes, dance in a nervous and malcordinated manner to the music.

This could be the description of a scene at virtually any concert any of us have ever been to. But tonight it is a portrait of the band itself, mid-performance.

It's hard to think of a band less rock star-like than Hot Chip. What they lack in dress sense and gravitas, however, is amply provided by the fact that they have produced some of the more interesting pop music to come out of Britain in the past decade.

Hot Chip, never the most comfortable bands with the limelight and the big stage, now find themselves unable to avoid it, particularly with the continued success of their new album One Night Stand which brings them to a virtually sold-out Leeds Academy tonight.

The band perform much like I imagine they rehearse in private, spending much of their time hunched over machinery and keyboards, deep in concentration, occasionally breaking to dance like you and I only dare do when no one is watching.

Sublime vocal harmonies mesh with pulsating keyboard riffs and hypnotic bass grooves.

Hit tracks Ready for the Fall, Over and Over and A Boy From School get the biggest response of the night, but it is on the new material where the band hit their stride most effectively, jamming in a way you would expect of a psychedelic rock band, only using banks of keyboards, percussion instruments and drum machines instead of thrashing on guitars. In short, the band let their instruments and songs do the talking.