Ratatat

LP4 (XL)

By Jonathan Shipley
Published: June 8th, 2010 | 7:00am

It’s all about sound for Ratatat. Lots and lots of sounds, mashed together, streaming in and out of each other, running parallel with one another, layered atop one another, swerving around one another, clattering around haphazardly before focusing in on a solid thriving beat. Lots and lots of sounds for our boys Ratatat, with their percussion and keyboard and all sorts of musical hoo-ha. The duo of instrumentalist-programmer Evan Mast and guitarist Mike Stroud love sound, so much so that when they released LP3 in 2008, they recorded a lot more than that funky album could handle. So, because of those prolific recording sessions in upstate New York, a “sequel,” if you could call it that, has been produced: LP4. All that said, if you liked their last album and thought it funky, well, then this one is Funky II: With a Vengeance.

Funkier? Indeed. They have incorporated even more sounds and instruments on this album, worked with a string section even, and have thrown in some spoken word interludes including the voice of Linda Manz, a child actress who achieved fame in Terrence Malick’s 1978 film, Days of Heaven. LP4 is reminiscent of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells albums if those were dragged into this iPad age. Album opener “Bilar” starts off quiet, like a fog, before crunching into a groovy urban soundscape that expands into something lush and vibrant. “Mandy” feels like the music you’d overhear in a strip mall RadioShack, if RadioShack was cool. “Bare Feast” has a Bollywood flavor, full of vim and ebullience. And that, perhaps, is what Ratatat hopes listeners will get out of their new album: feeling good and ebullient.

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