While this time last year the debut album from electro duo Justice had just dropped off the end of an oily production line somewhere in Paris’s IX arrondissement before ing over.
This July another duo " this time from Brooklyn, New York City " have pieced together LP3; a record that at first seems the complete opposite to . It’s Arabian, Balkan, Romany, Latin, otherly and odd where is a stunning hex of white male rockist bravado. In fact RATATAT appear to have assembled their third album by rifling through the scraps of sound that Justice tossed onto the ’reject’ pile while recording their debut to create something far less hyped, motley Raggy Dolls rather than a raging legion of Action Men.
Easy pinning aside, RATATAT’s Mike Stroud and Evan Mast find other ways to shy from the rock aesthetic. For one there are less of Stroud’s guitars on LP3 than there were on previous albums (even if those guitars make ’Mi Viejo’ one of the new effort’s stand-out cuts). Instead the pair decided to make use of what they found around them in their base upstate at Old Soul Studios; the recording space littered with keys mutated into a grand piano, a harpsichord, a mellotron, a Wurlitzer. The contrast between ’natural’ and synthetic sound lends tracks like ’Brulee’, ’Dura’ and sublime baby-dubshot ’Flynn’ an oddly alienated quality " they just feel slightly ’off’ somehow; lost in the gaps between various genres, an ambiguity reinforced by a lack of vocals.
It’s hard to find anchors anywhere in LP3 " it’s dynamic to the point of being fickle, restless instrumentation chasing melodic leads or rhythmic twists for a few seconds before the head of the whole thing is turned by another, newer development. Tracks like ’Mirando’ and ’Shempi’ are in constant flux, and here comparisons to Justice return. Both and LP3 (not to mention RATATAT’s previous output) make use of a building, ad hoc drive, but for different reasons " while you imagine Justice fighting to keep the dropping drug guts of party crowds ’up’ and attentive through dawn’s accursed light, RATATAT sound built to buddy-up to your ears on more leisurely pursuits " wandering with you through advertising breaks or in pursuit of Saturday serendipity when a hangover is firing synapses together for the first time. As regards to the former, they’ve already soundtracked ads for Hummer, Zune, Cartoon Network and Jaguar. The latter finds new echoes in the strange wiring of Daft Punk or, lately, Ohio’s Teengirl Fantasy. At times they sound like a retro-futurist’s vision of what Squeeze could become, if retro-futurists didn’t have a tendency to get ahead of themselves.
But while RATATAT’s anchorless (and thus, at times, heartless) flexibility makes them pliable to the whims of ad men, remixers and pretty much everyone else, there’s always the feeling that their textures are built to sabotage from within, hypnotic, alien notes steadily drawing you into their stream of consciousness ’til you’re locked on, moving in their direction, feeling slightly sick and excited at the same time as no-one seems to know or care where that direction might lead. To a more insidious crossover, perhaps, as LP3 sells you moonshine in found water bottles.
