HOT CLUB DE PARIS - THE RISE AND INEVITABLE FALL OF THE HIGH SCHOOL SUICIDE CLUSTER BAND

At the start of 2010, when AGCS looked at what the year ahead might hold, I said I was particularly excited by Hot Club De Paris’ promise to release two EPs and an album this year. The first of the EP’s “With Days Like This As Cheap As Chewing Gum, Why Would Anyone Want To Work?”, came out in February and was pretty great (read review), but I’m pleased to say that on their new (but similarly interminably titled) release the band have done even better.

Sure, there’s nothing here to rival Extra Time, Sudden Death, the highlight not only of the last EP but the band’s entire career, yet on the whole this is a far more consistent set of tunes with plenty of great moments. Opening track I’m Not In Love And Neither Are You starts off solidly enough, but when the instruments drop out and the handclaps-galore chorus swings into view it becomes truly special. Even better is the following track Biggie Smalls And The Ghetto Slams, with the EP’s most infectious chorus and even more handclaps.

Lead single Free The Pterodactyl 3 is in fact the weakest track on the EP, although this is hardly a critisism given the competition it faces. The title track, for example, is a perfect example of just why Hot Club are so great, with it’s chorus chants of “the rise and fall of the high school suicide cluster band” tumbling over more great riffs than most bands can fit on an entire album. 

For the EP’s last two songs the band slow things down a bit, and the results are the excellent The White Town Express (Get High, Stay Low) and Three Albums In And Still No Balled, both of which manage to show that behind the jokey titles and clever-clever lyricism there’s a real emotional core to Hot Club De Paris’ tunes. 

Listening to this record, it’s hard to understand why Hot Club De Paris have remained so unjustifiably overlooked. Here they undergo no startling reinvention or change of formula; they just continue to write brilliant songs, and given their plans to release an album alongside the two EPs they’ve already put out this year they can’t seem to stop writing them. Given how great their work has been so far, that can only be cause for celebration.

8/10