Joe Goddard : Harmonics
It seems that people first became aware of Joe Goddard’s solo work away from Hot Chip due to “Gabriel,” a gorgeous 2012 single sung by Valentina and aggressively remixed by Soulwax. So good was that song that it helped to obscure his actual debut, 2009’s Harvest Festival LP, which came out at a high point between Hot Chip’s Made in the Dark and One Life Stand albums. Harvest Festival was a spirited if messy collection of instrumentals seeing how far techno could stretch its arms. Goddard’s third solo album Harmonics does what his second, 2017’s Electric Lines, could not: it marries the focus of “Gabriel” to the carefree energy of his first album.
Goddard traverses a few specific lanes across the whole of Harmonics. There are of course songs that feel like they live[d] in the Hot Chip universe itself—the measured balladry of “Follow You,” for example, or “Mountains” with his bandmates Alexis Taylor and Al Doyle. There are funky connections to Afrobeat ably assisted by the likes of Guinean vocalist Falle Nioke (“Miles Away”) and Eno Williams of Ibibio Sound Machine. And songs like “On My Mind,” its vocal hook pitched down and made fuzzy like an old soul sample, track with the kind of warmly glitched electro-pop that Four Tet and Caribou have long defined.
The broadest of this album’s connections is to house and its endless permutations. Goddard pulls the reins on ecstatic and gospel house to guide “New World” and “Summon” to a subdued kind of romanticism. “Revery” starts with a clipped marching-band groove only to explode into jazz house with a massive bassline and saxophonist Alabaster DePlume. But it’s “Destiny” and Findia’s come-to-me pop narrative that feels like Goddard moving from indie-dance stages to the biggest of big rooms, flanging and arpeggios in tow. It drives home how his bandleading and collaborators on Harmonics result in a clutch of music suggesting he can do pretty much anything in the genre, collected on the most unabashedly fun album in his solo catalog.
Label: Domino
Year: 2024
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Joe Goddard : Harmonics
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