As French monks discovered centuries ago while under gothic spires, there is nothing like the sweep and pulse of intertwining melodies to lend momentum to music. Their melodic lines would twist along, gathering dissonances that would eventually explode against their rhythms into warm, open intervals. But back in those days, they didn't have drum machines to pull their lines into orbit. Ratatat does, and it gives their music an epic quality that would send any monk into fits of orgiastic glee.
Ratatat is a collaboration between lead guitarist Mike Stroud and bedroom producer Evan Mast, with piercing sheets of guitar and synthesizer yoked to a bass-heavy metronomic grid. The project marks a new direction for both musicians: Evan Mast's 2001 debut as E*vax, Parking Lot Music, was a stroll through a collection of debris both sleek and gritty, while Mike was known for ripping it up on stage with Ben Kweller and Dashboard Confessional. With Ratatat, however, the pair establishes a plush, crisp sonic space, and then holds court there for a good three quarters of an hour.
Theirs is an imperial presence, somewhere near the crossroads of rock, electronic and hip-hop. Though their songs are pop-length, and each is bound to get stuck in your head, these are not actually songs in the conventional sense. There are no vocals, for one thing, and they grow from point A to point B without looking back over their shoulder for a chorus. While the album is a home studio creation, most of the material begs to strut on stage for a hungry crowd. Indeed, what we have here is a long-awaited stepchild of IDM and hair metal sensibilities, joined by the omnivorous appetite of hip-hop.
And Ratatat is hip-hop. For starters, "Lapland" and "Breaking Away" feature the sort of spacious, head-nodding beats that fuel freestyle fantasies, and recently led the duo to a mixtape collaboration with Wu-Tang's Buddha Monk. The two waifish Crown Heights boys also sprinkle their album with samples of local rap veteran Young Churf, who starts out the album with a sly boast: "I've been rapping for about 17 years, okay? I don't write my stuff anymore. I just take it from my head..."
So it begins. The opener, "17 Years", is heavy artillery singed with the roar and crackle of distorted power chords. But it has a change of heart halfway through, wandering from the guitar-rock battlefield to graze on bittersweet, twilit pastures. "El Pico" cultivates a brighter kind of melancholy. Layered with scraping percussion, sweet electric piano figures, wiry synthesizers, and even an old accordion, it sets a tone that somehow manages to be intimate and epic at the same time.
Ratatat is also good old-fashioned rock. "Desert Eagle" has a sing-songy quality that explains why so many people have been trying to put words to these tunes since Mast and Stroud started performing together as Cherry last year. But if "Desert Eagle" promises an indie rock ballad, it soon turns into a towering arena-rock anthem that delivers a healthy dose of Brian May. There is, after all, more than a little Queen in Ratatat's sound, which, when paired with Evan's husky, meticulous beats, results in a surprisingly buoyant thrash that delivers on the promise of early rock/rap crossovers.
The duo's debut tends towards harmonic saturation, folding over you with great swaths of guitar and synthesizer. Unsurprisingly, the effect is intensely pleasurable, giving the album a warm and almost amniotic sense of immediacy. But a womb can also be a prison. Despite the risk of claustrophobia, Ratatat keep the oxygen flowing with well-proportioned chord cycles backed by spare, expansive beats. In soaring like a motet yet pounding like cavalry-- or, in modern terms, in ripping like Jimi but bumping like Dre-- Ratatat deliver on the ancient promise that harmony and rhythm, often set against each other in the history of Western music, are really just facets of one another.
