CD Choice: Dance Listen to Made in the Dark, the new album from Hot Chip, exclusively on ireland.com.

The chips are hot - at last

HOT CHIP Made in the Dark Virgin ****

Pop's great leaps forward have always begun at the margins.

As dance music splinters into a thousand micro genres incapable of going anywhere but further underground, it's the acts who once existed solely beneath glitterballs and strobe lights that are now producing mainstream sounds to savour.

Hot Chip fit into that niche, except that until now they've been on the edge rather than in the centre of the action. Their second album, 2006's The Warning, contained plenty of soundings of their potential, but they all too often flew hither and thither instead of knuckling down to business. For every bona-fide slam-dunk (Over and Over, Boy from School), there were inventive effort that missed the target by inches and occasionally feet. Too often you got the sense of an act trying to sound like every other act in their collective consciousness.

It has taken three albums for Hot Chip to relax and realise that their best strategy is to sound like, well, Hot Chip. What this means is crafting big, glittering electro-pop songs, full of sparkle yet often oozing tender, brittle emotions.

Ready for the Floor is the boom tune people will return to again and again, an anthem for misfits looking to waltz beyond the dancefloor, with Alexis Taylor's soulful yelp providing the geeky male lead (see review at right). Shake a Fist is a dizzy skyscraper of a track, full to the brim with sonic smarts and tricks yet hard-wired to a snaking, nagging groove. More wordy fare is provided by the softshoe r'n'b of Wrestlers and the hugely Hot Chippy Hold On, in which the band's bookish tendencies meet their hedonistic selves head on.

As great leaps go, Made in the Dark lands very much on its feet. www.hotchip.co.uk. JIM CARROLL.