Ratatat @ Sonar 10/5/08
We caught Ratatat last night on the last leg of their tour along with Panther and E*Rock for a night of nintendrone, gametronic, medieval video game rock, and whatever other words you can think of to describe the genre inspired by video game music (some more than others). The night began with E-rock dishing out his ADD (justice-inspired) blips and bleeps. I was standing right next to the speakers for part of his set and, although it wasn’t nearly as loud as MBV, it made the hair on my scalp tingle at times.
E-Rock tore up the crowd for the most part experimenting just enough to keep it interesting, but not too much where you couldn’t bob your head and dance to it. With his sunglasses and masked face, E-rock ended the show on a clever high note using a Wii-mote along with a guitarist and bassist to wash the crowd in a deluge of noise as they jumped around on stage with smoke machines billowing, all this while psychedelic vid-game style movies were playing in the background.
E*Rock “Exepat”
E*Rock “Living, Breathing, Etc”
Next up was Panther, who didn’t seem to understand that usually songs have a beginning middle and end: getting you right into the songs, building them up , and then, for some reason, just stopping right when they got interesting. It was ADD rock at it’s worst. And not that the music was bad, or that I can’t get into some non-traditional song structure, it just came off as unfinished at times.
The lead singer had some good vocal effects he was using to loop his voice over the music, but also seemed to just cut that short and not use it to it’s maximum potential. The drumming was the best part, especially since sonar’s sound was dead on that night, you could feel every snare hit in your eardrum and every bass kick in your chest. Even when the vocals got a little repetitive, the drums kept moving the songs along with ferocity.. that is until they would just stop short.
Panther “Puerto Rican Jukebox”
Finally, Ratatat did not disappoint. I think we expected more of an electronic show judging from their albums, turned out to be a lot of guitar rock/orchestration. I would put them in the same vein as Octopus Project or Trans Am for semi-experimental, instrumental rock with electronic elements. Mike Shroud is the centerpiece with some great wandering guitar riffs that lead to violent crescendos, a consistently specific style that could get redundant but always offers up new territories to explore. One of these territories, like on “Brulee” or “Flynn”, is a dub sound (Ala The Scientist) and on another the hip-hop beats mixed with the renaissance-metal guitar squeaks make an interesting fusion of noise. You can see why, when you see shroud play live, how he could also work with Joe Satriani.
I would say “Mirando” was the highlight of the set as the staccato Predator imagery flashed across the screen in sync to the songs. It was a little disappointing that they relied heavily on a backing track which I didn’t pay attention too until 3/4 of the way through the set. It would have been nice to see some real drums and at times it was tough to see what the keyboardist was playing and what was in the backing track. Arguably, this is still something I would describe as video game rock, but more of the medieval midi kind that you might find in Zelda or Castlevania. Just listen to a couple of the tracks below, matched up with “Shiller” or some of their other tracks. Take out the low-budget keyboard sounds and put in some distorted guitar, more natural sounding intruments, and voila: ratatat.
That being said, seeing these songs played live really brought them to life in a way that you just don’t get when listening to the album. And based on the reaction from the crowd, about 3/4’s of which were losing their shit, we weren’t the only ones who were made believers.
Ratatat – “Shiller”
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Legend of Zelda – Title Theme
Castlevania Ending Theme
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