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By: Jim Welte
Ratatat :: 09.08.08 :: The Fillmore :: San Francisco, CA
Over the course of three albums, two hip-hop remix mix tapes and a handful of Internet gems, the music of Brooklyn-based group Ratatat has largely defied categorization. It's instrumental and soundtrack-ish. It containts walls of swirling guitars and keyboards. It's full of chunky hip-hop beats. And it doesn't sound exactly like anything else.
But after a hazy, crazy one-hour set at The Fillmore in San Francisco, it was clear that Ratatat have simply made a digital upgrade of a genre that had long since gone the way of the late-night infomercial. This was Freedom Rock, man.
It was as hairy as the original, with both guitarist Mike Stroud and programmer/bassist Evan "E*vax" Mast sporting long hair and scruffy beards, while their comically exuberant touring keyboardist Jacob Morris shook his giant Afro all night long. It even smelled the same, as bursts from the group's onstage smoke machine merely blended into the surroundings.
But this was not your stoner uncle's Freedom Rock. Gone were the lyrical declarations of sovereignty and free love. Other than an occasional "thanks" and a brief happy birthday wish for Mast's cousin, the night featured no vocals whatsoever. The genre's frenetic guitar solos were there, but they came packaged within grooves that were more reminiscent of French duos like Air and Daft Punk than Skynyrd or the Allmans. And while the trio's head-bobbing stage antics suggested roiling improv jams, each song's beats were pre-programmed and synchronized to match chopped-and-looped videos from a floor-mounted projector onto on a screen behind them.
 Ratatat |
"Flynn," a lilting reggae number, was backed by the goofy music video of Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al" featuring Chevy Chase, while the blippy club track "Shempi" was backed by a cut-up Abba video that inserted new mouths and eyes onto its members. In the night's best music-to-video match, "Mirando," the stuttering tabla-tinged single off the band's latest release, LP3, was set to battle scenes from Predator, complete with a snickering Schwarzenegger in war paint. The programmed beats and video synchronization kept the songs tightly wound and left little room for expansion, particularly on older cuts like "Lex" and "Loud Pipes."
However, the compositions on LP3, a more nuanced and malleable bunch than on past efforts, didn't suffer from being hemmed in. Instead, the new songs' Spanish and Indian influences, coupled with the sound system's bone-crumbling bass and thunderous percussion, gave the set a tribal flavor at times. Mast has clearly taken a page from Timbaland, who has fused his hip-hop beats with vaguely ethnic elements in recent years to massive effect.
The night closed with the song that put Ratatat on the map, 2003's "Seventeen Years," an astounding amalgam of Sabbath, synths and handclaps that was accompanied by incessant blasts from the smoke machine.
This was Freedom Rock for the digital age: nuanced and melodic at times, blippy and bombastic at others, but always hazy.
JamBase | San Francisco
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