At 27, I honestly believe that I missed out on the best periods of popular music. I couldn’t get into clubs or venues in the early 90s, which left me outside looking in on grunge. By the time someone had handed me a legal form of identification, Nu Metal had replaced Nirvana, and I was left with little desire to sport a red backwards Yankees cap.
Sadly, I missed New Wave as well, as I was busy filling my day planner with events like “attend first grade” and “color inside of the lines,” rather than “see Psychedelic Furs.” Of course, everything prior to that was complicated by my lack of being born. Therefore, short of watching a few Indie movements, which for the most part amounted in little to nothing worth mentioning, I have pretty much missed out on everything worth bothering with.
This is because, in my opinion anyway, musicians have been transformed from traveling entertainers to replaceable marketing pawns. The Pinks fade to make room for the Katy Perrys, all the
while burying the Kevin Devines, Rocky Votolatos and Stacy Clarks. Granted, sometimes a Radiohead will emerge from the rubble and shambles of the music business. Hell, just in the past year I’ve stumbled across a few bands who I think could easily follow in Radiohead’s shoes of providing both substance and record sales.
After experiencing Sunday night’s sold out show, I’m adding Ratatat to that list.
In a haze of smoke produced by the mixture of a fog machine and pot, the group took stage, walking out to greet their onlooking ratataters, who had spent the last eight minutes cheering at the appearance of a poor man’s power point presentation a screen above the stage. Sporting a cut from their newest album, LP3 called “Brulee,” Ratatat sent the crowd of twelve-hundred bouncing, grinding and grooving in more ways than can be found in the movie Flashdance. Somehow combining hip-hop electro-beats with a Pink Floyd light show, Ratatat provides a very theatrical live setting.
The trio worked at an overtime pace to sell every note they’ve constructed, jerking their bodies in beat with the accents and shaking their asses in time with the synthesizers. I was pleasantly surprised to witness guitarist Evan Mast slam himself onto the floor in front of his amps, milking the feedback of “Lex” as much as he could. Fill in keyboardist Jacob Morris, from the Brooklyn group The Double, contorted his body into endless angles, leaning disproportionately away from his instruments until his head was resting on the stage floor. Needless to say, the group’s energy was rather moving, as seemed to inspire the whole damn room.
The groups set seemed to peak at “Wildcat,” in which a better half of the crowd growled with the song’s cat screeches so loudly, the venue walls were left rattling and my ears were left ringing. However, I must confess that if ringing ears is the only complaint I have at the end of an evening, I’m honestly doing pretty well in today’s market. Trust me when I say Ratatat’s intense live show is one worth mentioning. I expect big things from these boys.
Setlist:
Brulee
Mi Viejo
Mirando
Gettysburgh
Bird Priest
Snifters
Lex
Mumtaz
Loud Pipes
Flynn
Falcon Jab
Wildcat
Schemi
\\
Montana
17 Years
Ratatat: website | myspace | LP3 review
Photos By: Joshua Hammond
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