CD Review: Ratatat "LP3"

Written by: Rachel Antony-Levine

Ratatat has been known in the past for their innovative sound, incorporating technical compositional techniques with a hip-hop feel to create a truly new and appropriate sound for today's young generation. I consider them one of the most exciting bands to appear in the past decade. So, this is a band you need to check out, regardless of what I say about their latest album, LP3. Okay ?

LP3 begins with the X-Files theme - perhaps this is not intentional, but it is very appropriate. Ratatat took a darker approach to this album than I had expected. Some songs reminded me of a scene from an R.L. Stein paperback and others reminded me of a spooky amusement park ride (after you've snuck in late to find the ghosts still riding the carousel). Other songs just make you feel like you're on a submarine in the middle of the ocean on another planet.

Ratatat have always been great melodists, but melody is not the focus of this album. LP3 is more about texture than anything else and Ratatat branches out with new instruments (talking drum, harpsichord and perhaps autoharp?) and even incorporate voice on a few tracks. They deemphasize the guitar parts completely. Previous albums highlighted lush, tight guitar harmonies but this album doesn't. The guitars rest at times, instead allowing the guitar to play a bit here, a bit there but never really shine.

My appreciation for Ratatat grew immensely last year when my friend, Bryson, pointed out to me that Ratatat are amazing part-writers. For those of you who haven't taken a music theory lesson, a quick digression: Part-writing, perhaps most paradigmatically used by J.S. Bach, utilizes Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass parts equally. When done well, all parts play at once to create clever harmonies, but if a single part is taken out of context, it stands on its own as a plausible melody line. What most bands do is compose a melody (usually sung) and a bass line (though often not an interesting one), and then they just play full chords. Ratatat almost never plays full chords on their guitars. Instead, they play "parts," like instruments in any orchestra would.

Ratatat employs this same technique on most tracks on their previous albums, Ratatat and Classics, but they don't do it nearly as much on LP3. How do I feel about this? I don't know. I just don't know. On the one hand, I feel like LP3 is a musically less complex album, albeit with a very complex production. On the other hand, I don't want to be guilty of holding Ratatat to one thing. So they're branching out. Good for them! Right?

Just think about how you felt when Radiohead released Kid A. You were a little surprised, but you had enough faith in the band to be excited about the direction they were going in. So then you bought Amnesiac as well, and now, even though you don't throw Kid A into the CD player when you have that Radiohead hankerin', you still recognize the necessary artistic process that the production of Kid A was for Radiohead.

In other words, how I feel about LP3 depends on the next album to come from Ratatat. If this is a signal of a new direction (which I think it is) then I'm down.

Listen to (download):
"Mirando"