There's something fascinating about the mercenary nature of soundtrack library music-- pay-per-use stuff that is composed behind the simple idea of a generating an aesthetic mood; music designed to make your brand cooler or your TV show more action-packed without having to rely on the pre-existing memories that come with, say, a Who song. Despite the fact that there's nothing inherently commercialized about their club-music-skewing instrumental electronic rock, Ratatat seem to have been slotted into this very purpose over the course of their career, to the point where the same song of theirs-- "Gettysburg", from their 2006 album Classics-- has been used to score both a Nylon.com Marc Jacobs fashion show feature and a GOOD Magazine animated video on the nuclear arms race. Aside from what visual or informational stimulus someone else augments Ratatat's music with, there isn't really that much content there-- or, conversely, there's potential for the music to be and sound like anything but no one discernable identity.
And yet this isn't to its detriment. Ratatat's music is only really as empty as you make it, and with LP3-- like Classics and their eponymous debut, a title that looks deliberately unevocative of anything-- the duo of guitarist Mike Stroud and multi-instrumentalist Evan "E*Vax" Mast has created a soundtrack for just about whatever, modular music that turns its lack of contextual framing into a likeable sort of walk-around/drive-around/social gathering background music that doesn't exist to sell anything but your own current experience. It's a bit blank, but that only means it begs to be drawn on with fat markers, and any voiceless absence of humanity is made up for by the fact that runtime scripts don't get this arch just on their own. (The leadoff track's called "Shiller", ferchrissakes.)
The core Ratatat formula remains largely intact-- deceptively basic but heavily layered pan-genre hook-loops that hover inside some kind of disco/rock/hip-hop triangulation, supplemented by Stroud's bionic Brian May guitar work and Mast's enthusiasm for making synthesizers emit hyperactive space-fight sounds. And it's surprisingly endurable over four-minute doses, like the beat-em-up video game groove of "Falcon Jab" or the Loverboy roller-boogie of "Shempi", which pack in enough energy and dynamics to keep a good balance between catchiness and restlessness. It doesn't quite jump out as readily in the quieter or calmer moments: the semi-acoustic, tabla-driven "Mi Viejo" evokes sweeping scenes of Southwestern vistas in some sort of Sergio Leone-goes-Bollywood score scenario, and the downtempo "Bruleé" resembles the sort of melody the Bee Gees would've written in 1970 applied to short-circuiting robo-pop, but their pleasures aren't quite as immediate.
One of the other keys to LP3's simple appeal is its vague but noticeable internationalism, like the work of a couple of guys who were told by a director to "skew kind of Timbaland" and decided to take that superficial, derivative task into more far-flung places. "Mumtaz Khan" lands between Middle and Far Eastern on the rhythmic backbone of a Miss E banger; "Mirando" layers pitched-up Thin Lizzy riffage over a rhythmic motif somewhere amidst Calcutta and Rio and Miles Davis' "Black Satin"; and tracks like "Imperials" and "Bird Priest" ride rhythms that have some tangential connection to a non-Western musical structure or another, turning them inside-out and blurring their origins to make them sound unstuck in geography. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book, and erasing the borders of international music into a sound that evokes little more than "indistinctively foreign" has its own pitfalls, but somewhere inside all that TV spot rock runs a pulse that beats like Top 40.
Which is where the disappointment comes in: even the best beats on this album feel unfinished without vocals. There's nothing intrinsically flawed about what's otherwise a solid instrumental record, but so much of it feels so close to many of the things happening on the radio and the pop charts right now that, 90 seconds into a song, the mind might start wandering and wondering what this kind of stuff would sound like with Wale or Rihanna on top of it. Ratatat released a brief but solid two-volume run of self-released mixes that put this kind of music under the likes of Memphis Bleek and Missy Elliott and Kanye West, and it worked well, so maybe those releases and LP3 are warm-ups for a strange, new kind of career in R&B and hip-hop production as some kind of weird nu-Neptunes. For now, we'll just have to fill in the blanks.
