Blogarhythms

While composing yesterday’s love-note to decade-strong genre-defining artists I almost forgot a couple of indie musicians that’ve been gracing my headphones of late who are putting out a new record this week too. Not to take anything away from monsieurs Hansen, Burton and Thaws — or their respective projects — but they already have piles of record sales, critical accolades and media knob-slobbery to lean on.

Previous Blogarhythms featurees Ratatat, a Brooklyn-based instrumental electronic duo comprised of Mike Stroud on guitars and Evan “E*vax” Mast on synths, aren’t as renowned as all that. Though they’re certainly celebrated by a peculiar variety of music listener, and have landed tracks in a couple of high profile advertising campaigns & film projects. And while it’s about as likely that their new full-length LP3 will make them household names as it was hearing one of their songs in a Hummer commercial would make their fans run out and buy one of the gas-guzzling behemoths, it should please those fans, and hopefully win them a few new ones.

LP3 is definitely, almost defiantly, a different sort of record for the pair. Many of the songs are stripped down, relying more on melody, atmosphere and the tonality of their instruments, both tangible and synthetic, than beats. Still others embrace a more earthy, acoustic sound, incorporating hand-drums and a myriad of foreign percussion in addition to melodies and rhythms influenced by so-called “World Music,” particularly Baltic, Middle Eastern and Roma music.

This shouldn’t be taken as indicative that they’ve abandoned the brand of drama-infused beat-centric lo-fi Electronica (with it’s liberal appropriation of ’70s Glam, Prog and Arena-Rock pomposity) they’re known for though. In other words, they still sound better next Justice than they would Gogol Bordello in your mix. So, even as tunes like “Shiller” and “Black Heroes” strip away the beats, sounding like Vangelis and Steve Vai trying their hands at ’60s-style boroque psychedelic Pop in the process, and “Mi Vijeo” & “Flynn” take the band’s synthesizers to a Mexican village and a Jamaican dub mixing session respectively, joints like “Mirando” and “Imperials” give us the booming drums and crunchy synth/guitar textures we expect, while still indulging in experimentation.

Ratatat “Mirando”

Album highlight “Falcon Jab” does all that and then some, freaking Tetris-esque Eastern European keyboards over chunky programmed beats, bongo rolls and an ill talk-box-effected guitar lead. Then they get real funky, breaking the track down to a groovy Euro-Disco shuffle replete with “wakka-wakka” guitars, backwards synth-strings, chimes and spaceship & laserbeam synthesizer effects. It reminds me of Boney M.’s 1978 Disco hit “Rasputin,” and makes me want to hit up a roller-disco, but with Borat Sagdiyev as my wingman.

Ratatat “Falcon Jab”

Which is saying nothing of the eerily pretty “Bruleé,” where the two reinterpret Stax and Hi Records-influenced Southern Soul and the bouncy-but-melancholic girl-group Pop for the laptop generation. But then again, if I said any more you wouldn’t have to go check out LP3 for yourself, now would you?