Hot Club de Paris – The Rise And Inevitable Fall…

Earlier in the year the EP entitled ‘With Days Like This As Cheep As Chewing Gum, Why Would Anyone Want To Work’ allowed Hot Club de Paris to showcase their knack with complex, beguiling math-pop and with this year’s second release they get to show off the other move that they can pull so well. ‘The Rise And Inevitable Fall of the High School Suicide Cluster Band’ is the trio’s pop EP.

Still showcasing the way with words, tight harmonies and spindly guitar riffs that has made the group cultly popular since their debut album ‘The Rise And Inevitable Fall…’ has some of Hot Club de Paris best ever choruses. ‘I’m Not In Love And Neither Are You’ and ‘Biggie Smalls And The Ghetto Slams’ set the tone for this with the second being a sad song about bands that don’t make it. Of course, it’s smart and funny enough to not be a smush-fest, something the band seem proud of, titling the last song on the EP ‘Three Albums In And Still No Ballad’.

Worth checking out, even if you don’t go for the entire EP is the (near) title track. The drumming is superb and it’s the moment where the two sides of the band come the closest to resolving each other. Instruments drop in and out and in the guitar playing there’s a distinct classic rock influence., but to make things all the more odd the chorus actually features a recitiation of the title. For with the Hot Club the silly names aren’t just for title purposes.

Of the six songs (all of which you probly should own if you’re at all into the current UK underground scene that’s birthed as fantastic acts as Johnny Foreigner and Dananananaykroyd – neither of which would exist as they do without Hot Club de Paris) our favourite, by far is ‘Free The Pterodactyl 3’, which recounts the story of the ‘liberation’ of a model version of said dinosaur from a fair ground. It’s oddly affecting. Hot Club de Paris in a nutshell then.