New Build:

Pour It On (Sunday Best Recordings)

Hot Chip members Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard may hog the side-project limelight with (respectively) The About Group and The 2 Bears (new album out last week), but fellow Chippers Al Doyle and Felix Martin are no slouches. Along with studio engineer and electronic composer Tom Hopkins they've formed New Build and this second album proper builds on their 2012 debut by serving up languid synthpop cut with a dash of downtempo Ibizan House music and sprinkled with that East London cool which is also a Hot Chip trademark. It's never predictable, though: seven-minute opener The Sunlight appears to be constructed from a series of blissful synth washes but five minutes in, that wash turns into a squall, underlining a lyrical conceit which isn't sunny at all. Listen to Luminous Freedom, meanwhile, and it's hard not to be reminded that Doyle was a sometime member of late-lamented New York punk/dance outfit LCD Soundsytem.

Barry Didcock