The Hot Chip back catalogue has a nice line in melody and Taylor’s solo albums with their delicate arrangements; Beautiful Thing, though, is more of a straightforward float through space, with a starry, galactic feel to the album.
If music is a metaphor here then it’s an appropriate one, since music is so bound up with emotions and the way in which people relate to one another. Beautiful Thing works so well because it reminds us of that fact without losing its own emotional resonance.
The more you listen to Beautiful Thing, the more you realise what a marvel of sequencing it is: here are songs that truly talk to each other, musically and lyrically.
Though it requires patience much of the album works through a subdued and slowly expanding tear of instrumentation.
Beautiful Thing is Taylor's most rounded and intriguing solo work to date.
Kinetic and heartfelt, Beautiful Thing lives up to its name and delivers some of Taylor's finest solo music yet.
Beautiful Thing shows the other end of Alexis Taylors talents as both a songwriter and a musician, and it’s time that more discovered them.
‘Beautiful Thing’ sees Taylor working with a producer for the first time in his solo career, joining forces with the former co-founder of UNKLE and then DFA, Tim Goldsworthy, who, while not doing Taylor any favours in the ‘this isn’t a Hot Chip album’ department, adds some more meat to the album’s occasionally brittle bones.
Taylor’s brilliantly bonkers pop odyssey certainly lives up to its title and ultimately, is an impressive, if uneven addition to his already stellar discography.
Hot Chip’s singer sounds caught in an irresistible haze on his latest solo LP, making music that’s more deluxe than usual but far scruffier than his main band.
Beautiful Thing can be marked down as an interesting experiment but not a great record.
On his own, he gets sucked under in a morass of teardrop-shaped pop, without the pep of his comrades. You can’t get your dance on here, just your mope.
Beautiful Thing is a confident statement about musical and human authenticity, with production by UNKLE’s Tim Goldsworthy which builds dub-like echo chambers, inside which a kitchen sink’s worth of sounds claustrophobically rattle.
There’s no faulting his - and his producer’s ambition. It doesn’t always quite hit those high notes, but the pair have set out to create a sometimes elusive feeling of connection.
Beautiful Thing isn't the flashiest, and it sags along the way, but it comes with enough soul to carry the quiet moments.
‘Beautiful Thing’, his fourth solo album, is probably his most overt and successful attempt to marry the pulsating aura of Hot Chip and the more melancholy and freaky output of his solo career.
Throughout Beautiful Thing, Taylor is prone to polar extremes of either mopey self-doubt or contrived affirmation, and in either case he expresses emotion in only the broadest of terms.
The polar opposite of 2016’s exceedingly quiet Piano, Beautiful Thing is an eclectic combination of ups and downs.