Marketing dictates that Ratatat are sold to you, exuberant consumer, as
rock-'n'-roll band: two guys from NYC who love the Rolling Stones, are
pals with Interpol, and pose on the cover of their debut disc with
guitars slung o'er their hipsters' shoulders. Of course, such
salesmanship bears scant relation to the, y'know, like, music, the
erected rock-'n'-roll artifice belying the artistry inside. Ratatat's
tunes have much more in common with Evan Mast's solo action, homemade
endeavors that find him authoring the tweelectro tunes as E*Vax;
endeavors which, last time I checked, were hardly being bankrolled by
the checkbook A&R brothaz at XL. In all his Casiotonic cutesiness, as
E*vax Evan has yet to even hit the big leagues of "indietronica," his
closest crack coming with an appearance on a Morr Music compile. Whilst
the rock-'n'-roll curtain has been pulled across to convince the denizens
of pop-culture-at-large that Ratatat are in charge of elecktro's Emerald
City, the debut Ratatat disc is still back in bed in E*Vax's Kansas,
still farming the same artistic shtick Mast's tilled to little acclaim
thus far. Here, he hooks up with guitarist Mike "Snake" Stroud, a
six-stringer whose musical dayjob is playing with fully-fringed
indie-pop songsmith Ben Kweller; and together they head down a yellow
brick road paved in Lego, playing plastique melodies on the plastic
ivories of analog keyboards whilst their programmed beats keep cute
rhythms, the pair playfully playing with the "robotic" notions of dated
electronics as their set lurches with mechanized motion. The rhythms
are simple, and rarely are the songs ostentatious or flamboyant, despite
the fact that they intermittently deliver samples (with some sort of cheap
irony) of some slang-wrangling hip-hopper who's happy to parrot the
obligatory clichés of the genre, and despite the fact that they're
supposedly strutting with "rock-'n'-roll swagger." Like early arcade-game
programmers, Ratatat are working with a greatly reduced palette, and the
synth reductionism means they're never going to escape cute. Even the
guitars they mug with on the disc's cover, which could possibly a tonal
wild-card, are reined in, brought into their greatly reduced palette by
being heavily treated, their distorted riffs cleaned up and cut up,
brought back into the mix as mere movable parts to keep this robo-pop
ride rolling along with synthetic-sounding smoothness.
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