Rodent All Terrain Armoured Transport?

 The 2008 issue of LFTWY might be my favourite, it has a couple of very interesting pieces, plus this...

RATATAT – LP3 (XL Recordings) 

I’m sure we all have mystery records on our shelves, for which we can find no provenance. Did I buy this? Did someone give it to me? Did I bag it in a forgotten tombola? I own no fewer than 4 CDs by Ratatat, despite having no idea whom they might be nor any recollection of procuring them. At best guess, they were promos sent out for review (though not to me, of that I’m certain). They’re pretty decent, mind, which is why they’re still on the shelf today. This album – I'm guessing their third, but I’ve been caught by that particular Wilbury trick before, so I’m staying non-committal – fits in a post-trip-hop world, having down-tempo groovy sections, glossy bouncy pop sections, and the odd ersatz rock move. It’s not very serious, but neither is it actually funny; it’s referential, but not really satirical or critical; it’s like library music for reluctant readers. 

There isn’t really much depth to this album, but the surfaces are most attractive. ‘Shiller’, the opening number, sounds like someone trying to play the X-Files theme on some toys (imagine if someone had described a Plaid track to someone who just woke up from a 40-year coma, this is probably what they’d come up with), but then some cheeky chorus guitar comes in, and it sounds like a section from the very end of Tubular Bells. Similar studio-bound unrocking guitar sounds crop up regularly across the album, nasally insistent, and sometimes with purring flange effects, and it all gives an unusually handmade edge to what is ostensibly a machine-made record. Random aside: the name ‘Shiller’ makes us imagine Sean Connery appearing on Blind Date. 

Some tracks feel like market-trader knockoffs of contemporaneous dance acts, with ‘Falcon Jab’ giving us restrained Nile Rodgers guitar and sort of Frampton-talky-guitar-thing sounds over a chunky beat recalling Daft Punk, whilst ‘Flynn’ is a slinky confection, halfway between vintage soundtrack cues by Roger Roger and winking dancefloor pop by Röyksopp. ‘Dura’, with its harpsichord and ambling beat seems like a clear nod to Dre’s Eminem productions. 

There are occasional tunes with rhythms featuring clipped percussion and arpeggiating bleeps, placing them somewhere between an Eski-era grime beat and the Donkey Kong 64 soundtrack - check out ‘Mirando’ and ‘Bird Priest’ for examples. Other tracks lean on less electronic references, such as ‘Mi Viejo’ with its tabla, acoustic guitar and Herbie Flowers-ish bass, or the Western chase theme played by a baseball organ which is ‘Gypsy Threat’, whereas ‘Imperials’ is more atypical, coming across like an RnB jam in a bamboo junkyard, and ‘Mumtaz Khan’ sounds like Mothra doing Boyz II Men, before a that guitar comes in again, and threatens to go into the ‘Hotel California’ solo (I promise I’m not making this up).  

This is probably not the favourite 2008 album of anyone in the whole world, including Ratatat, but it’s a breezy, colourful bit of fun. I just listened to it twice in a row, and enjoyed it even more the second time. If that trend continues it will be the greatest 42 minutes in the history of humanity by next weekend...