Joe Goddard Harvest Festival Review

Hot Chip’s resident spectacular spectacle-wearer Alexis Taylor was the first band-member to break cover with a solo album, his charmingly ramshackle Rubbed Out appearing on the obscure Treader label in late-2008. As befits impressions of Joe Goddard as the band’s beat scientist to Taylor’s lyricist and crafter of songs, his own solo debut is a collection of tracks less fussed about cohering with one another than they are keen to keep feet moving and good times flowing. It’s ironic, then, that Harvest Festival only takes flight when it quits the dancefloor to have a cry in the toilets.

Harvest Festival is the first album release by Greco-Roman, the label that’s grown out of Goddard’s raucous warehouse parties of the same name. But while it’s possible to imagine some of these tracks satisfying when fleetingly woven into a DJ set, they largely fail to match utility with depth. While the engorged basslines of Tinned Apricot and Strawberry Jam or the fidgety, Detroit-influenced shuffle of Pear Shaped (all the track titles are fruit-flavoured) will pick you up and shake you if you’re within 20 feet of a bass-bin, they’re simplistic electrohouse constructions that don’t go far on their own merits.  At times, such as during the breakdown towards the end of Strawberry Jam, melodic reminders of Hot Chip can be discerned in their midst, but the comparisons never slant in Harvest Festival’s favour.

The album picks up when it turns down more idiosyncratic pathways. Half Time Oranges is a moving synth miniature, while Tropical Punch frames stuttering clave-like tones and a hazily distorted bassline with a gentle, wiry breakbeat. These forays away from the decks, touching on the work of Warp alumni from Aphex Twin to Clark, are only bettered by the shimmering power ballad Lemon and Lime (Home Time). Streaks of wispy synth pads hang weightless above a warm bass core that cushions Goddard’s soft, vulnerable delivery. The lyric is soaked in the same maudlin nostalgia that informs Hot Chip’s I Was a Boy From School.    

These deviations from the dance don’t quite make Harvest Festival the success it might have been, but they salvage it from inconsequentiality. It’s interesting to consider, especially with a new Hot Chip album on the way in February 2010, that in the case of Goddard, Taylor and the rest of the band, melancholy appears to be their most effective mode.