After living with the new Hot Chip album for the best part of a week, it feels like my thoughts about it are finally beginning to coalesce. They’re a curious band, I think: a consummate, bright pop band on the one hand; a group whose songs gradually insinuate themselves over time. What initially appears slight, eventually becomes unforgettable. I guess this is why I held off writing about “Made In The Dark” immediately. Though songs like “Over And Over” , “Boy From School” and “Colours” still loop round in my head, months after I last played “The Warning”, they didn’t lodge immediately. With a certain logic, the first song to stick from “Made In The Dark” has been the first proper single, “Ready For The Floor”. Again, it’s a sneaky little indie-pop song smuggled in under the cover of a modish electronic production. And again, it’s sat comfortably in my mind for the foreseeable future. In general, though, it seems as if the appealing frailty of “The Warning” has been covered up by a relatively heavier, dirtier, funkier sound. With a vocalist like Alexis Taylor, of course, Hot Chip are never going to be butch, exactly, but the tweeness of that last record – and for once I use the word as a positive, not as a pejorative – isn’t quite as pronounced. There’s still the sense of little-boy-lost-in-nightclub, but this time the nightclub is conceivably a bit more debauched, and the little boy has got a bit more confidence. Consequently, “Made In The Dark” kicks off with a flurry of synths that approximately replicate, as the sage John Robinson to my left just noted, the Penguin Café Orchestra, then thumps off into a cranky, but comparatively steely-eyed melange of squirts, yelps, jackhammer beats and deviously catchy hooks that goes by the name of “Out At The Pictures”. There’s definitely a desire to jar, avoid cutesiness, this time, hence plenty of migraine-frequency repetitions and a generally rougher touch to tracks like the Todd Rundgren-sampling “Shake A Fist”, the nagging “Bendable Poseable” and “Touch Too Much”, which highlights a certain kind of modernist R&B influence that’s much more comprehended and processed than most examples of indie boys with a Timbaland fetish. The latter, especially, sets itself up to be something of an irritant, but Hot Chip constantly, cleverly evade anything quite so straightforward. I must admit that, right now, this grittier strategy isn’t working for me quite as well as the softer touch of “The Warning”. But like I said at the start, with every listen, the brainy and powerful heart of “Made In The Dark” becomes more visible beneath the layers of twitch and obfuscation. I think I’ve more or less got the hang of the first half of this longish, absorbing album. But, as I write, the back end is starting to make more sense, too: the minimal, plaintive ballads like the title track, “Wrestlers” (somewhere between Aaliyah and Flight Of The Conchords, more or less) and the two poignant closers, “Whistle For Will” and “In The Privacy Of Our Love”, that sound more soulful and less affected than previous quiet moments; and some meaty, fairly rocking things like “One Pure Thought”, “Hold On” and the fantastic second phase of “Don’t Dance”. It’s out in February, I believe. Once every tune is keeping me awake, I’ll try and revisit this one.

I wasn’t able in the end to go to see The National at Shepherd’s Bush Empire last night, but Chris Robert’s nobly came off the sub’s bench to file this report. THE NATIONAL SHEPHERDS BUSH EMPIRE Wednesday, November 7 2007 On the first of two nights here, The National are celebrating reaching another level. Even a year ago they were “just” a cult band whose intense, interior weaving of song and structure was loved passionately by devotees and ignored by those averse to subtlety. Their Brooklyn-via-Ohio career was doggedly, if not spectacularly, picking up momentum. Since the release of this year’s Boxer album, however, they’ve become a music-lover’s benchmark, an acid test. They’re the kind of band now that start debates and by which people judge their friends. Boxer, the ultimate slow-burner, refused to take the obvious building-block route of being a poppier Alligator, but those who “get” it - and there’s a lot to “get” under all that implicitness and understatement and existential angst - think those who don’t should be packed off to the nearest village that’s short one idiot. Perhaps only American Music Club, of their ilk, make you (want to) work so hard to hear the penny drop, keep you waiting so long to see the sun rise. Once the scales fall away, these songs are indecently addictive. Like Leonard Cohen or Morrissey or Raymond Carver, The National are usually painted as miserable sods, but in fact thrive on the romantic grace note that comes after the shrug of defeatism. The heady euphoria and emotional liberation that arrive after giving up is their meat and drink. There is so much cleverly-gauged, self-effacing comedy in lyricist Matt Berninger’s apparent despair, and once you’ve twigged that, their live performances are exhilarating. His recorded persona is an Everyman pushing a rock up a cliff; onstage he‘s shy except when flailing around like a tall bird with wounded wings. The band strain rock of the pale, lean, Joy Division/early U2 variety into fresh, troubled territories. That guitarist Bryce Dessner plays with Philip Glass is only about the twelfth most interesting thing going on here amid the controlled clash of elevation and dislocation. A mammoth USA tour has strengthened rather than tired them: you can, for the first time, envision them playing stadiums. It’d be no weirder a transition than that made by REM or U2. The interplay between the Devendorf brothers’ rhythms and the Dessner twins’ guitars is honed to perfection: every dynamic counts, every surge thrills. The Dessners’ mother is present. It’s “the first time she’s seen us outside Ohio“, they announce bashfully. “And nobody comes to see us in Ohio, so she was finding this a great event. Until she was thrown out for smoking drugs.” After Letterman appearances and playing with Springsteen, The National are not as timid as they were. The audience knows every word now: singing along to Matt’s mumbles they come across like a mash-up of Confucius and Bukowski. They start with “Start A War”. Padma Newsome’s violin takes a florid solo in “Racing Like A Pro”. “Wasp’s Nest” is like Jimmy Webb’s gushier excesses toned down by a benign Harry Nilsson, while new single “Apartment Story” gets a crowd bellowing about hiding away behind locked doors watching TV. Don’t be last to hear the secret: The National are going global. Chris Roberts

I've been gently kicking myself for the past few days after discovering The Necks were playing a couple of shows just down the road from me in Dalston. By the time I tried to get tickets on Sunday afternoon, they'd long sold out. Their new album, "Townsville", is compensation of a kind, but it also makes me regret missing them more than ever. The Necks, I should explain, are a bass/drums/piano trio from Sydney who are usually referred to as jazz, though they strike me as being far too mystical and evasive a band for such a reductive label. As far as I can tell, they turn up at a venue or a studio, set up and then roll out an improvised piece that usually lasts for about an hour. This one, "Townsville", is a live recording from a place of the same name in Thuringowa, Northern Queensland. I guess the idea of totally improvised music usually suggests freeform abstractions, but one of the many things that's fascinating about The Necks is their absolute rigour and restraint. Like some of the other music by them that I have (there are loads of albums, but "Mosquito/See Through" and "Drive By" are ones I can authoritatively recommend), this is gentle and insidious music that's not a million miles away from an acoustic rendering of something ambient: Eno circa "Music For Airports", maybe. But what drives it are the rapturous piano flurries of Chris Abrahams, that remind me of some of Alice Coltrane's sparser playing. I was going to compare them, too, to repeatedly breaking waves in a slightly cliched fashion, then I read the press release use the same metaphor very elegantly. "It's like watching the ocean as wave follows wave," someone from the label, ReR Megacorp, notes, "each the same; each different - assymmetric." In an office just behind the Tate Modern, on a cold November morning, it provides a very restful beginning to the day: one of those records which has a truly captivating subtlety, that initially suggests predominantly ambient uses, but draws you in. After a while, I find myself distracted and entranced by it, concentrating on how Abrahams minutely alters his playing at every pass, how he heads towards a kind of resolution that can take an age to finally arrive. It's incredibly controlled, intuitive and absorbing music, and I can't recommend it enough. Sink in.