4 out of 5

Label: Sire

Produced by: Dave Sardy

When Hot Hot Heat dropped their herky jerk on the sub pop scene in the early 00s, the exact wrong kind of people and magazine covers and hairdos began to praise them for me to do anything but aggressively brush them off and go back listening to something mad aggro, dog.

Later, I was force fed some songs and grudgingly admitted ‘alright’ status, but I was busy, like, cataloguing comics and stuff, so bugger off.

As usual, twas the magic ear of producer Dave Sardy that encouraged me – nay, required me – to finally check them out, on a major label debut, no less.  And here’s the thing about It bands that made it through the crucible of the Strokes / Yeah Yeah Yeahs indie emergence: Those that are still kicking (HHH, 15ish years on, just set a date on their “final” album), hate ’em or not, tend to have a common thread: They can write pretty catchy songs.

HHH’s catchy still involves quite a bit of herky jerk and bluster, but at its core – which Sardy (he noted, with bias) exposes – the group is all about a good melody and a good riff.  And with the right “capture” of that goodness, as on Elevator, the clear talent of the players is evident; their energy – we’ll call it fun – as infectious as every single song’s stuck-in-your-head chorus.

Now, like another Sardy-got-me-there pop band, OK Go, HHH have a lot of candy-coating going on: The lyrics are pretty much endless struggle bars that are about rhyming, but they’re not senseless or soulless.  And though the songs are infectious, that is more the aim: To make you move vs. making you swoon with emotion.

It’s almost hilarious how far down in the mix all of the “extras” on Elevator are – the keys, extra instrumentation, backup vocals, they’re all there, flavoring the experience, but the focus is absolutely on the dynamics of drums and vocals and bass and guitar, and given how easily each track can be consumed, I think downplaying the clutter worked out well.

So I came late to the HHH party, for sure, and purists will tell me that this is a too-polished version of the band, but as accessible as it may be, I think this is a release with heart, produced to a gleeful pup, and primed for relistens.