The first time I saw that Ratatat’s third LP would simply be called LP3, it immediately called into mind a crucial part of my adolescence I hadn’t thought about in a really long time – The Emo Game. Though not quite sure of its national popularity, I know that it was all that a good portion of my school played for a few months or so. I was reminded of this because there was a crucial part in which the lead singer of Sunny Day Real Estate came to warn about the mediocrity of the third album that befell many bands (they chose to pick out Jimmy Eat World among others).
Though Ratatat certainly isn’t an emo band and I can’t guarantee that they were as cool as me and played that game back in the day, something tells me they thought a little bit about where they wanted their third album to go. Based on the way their second album wasn’t able to project as well the vibrancy and catchy nature of their debut, it looked as though they could fall into a monotonous pattern of similar song structures with diminishingly interesting melodies.
Instead, LP3 showed that they were looking to do something different. You can tell with the first song and first single off the album, “Shiller.” Rather than starting with a rapper boasting about his prowess, it begins with an ‘80s sounding synth that immediately blends into a slow, thought out build up with uncharacteristic dynamic changes and instrumentation for Ratatat. The song doesn’t even whip out a beat, but it lets you know that Ratatat certainly have been hard at work developing their own sound.
This lends itself to each song having its own feel, as if Ratatat were trying to combine their already familiar sound with a variety of different genres, sometimes even naming the songs after the mood they are trying to create—from the light, old French feel of “Bruleé” to the Latin aesthetic of “Mi Viejo.”
The nicest part of the album is seeing the array of different instrumentation and sound manufacturing that Ratatat incorporates in the album, though that also leads to the faults of the album. At times it feels like they’re trying to almost do too much with it, whereas I think Ratatat works best on the songs where they can do more with less. That being said, LP3 makes me excited for what we can expect from Ratatat in the future, especially since they already have LP4 ready to be released later this year. This band’s only begun to show us what it’s capable of, and I can’t wait to hear more.
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