Ratatat
LP4
(Beggars)

Certain songs tend to evoke different musical fantasies. Rock songs tend to make you a little ornery. Structured pop songs give you a mythical toothache. Ratatat’s new album, LP4, is a little of both, a certain structured chaos that seems to make you feel brilliant one minute and completely lost the next. After a decade together, the duo has found a way yet again to make unstructured chaos. LP4 stands as the groups most adventurous album to date, complete with new rhythm and song structures which seem a huge departure from previous successful efforts and falls a little flat in the process.

At times a bit over the top, the general conclusion I came to upon my third listen to this album was confusion. On the song, “Drugs,” the synth overpowers Stroud’s guitar in the chorus. The confusing German (from Herzog’s Stroszek) passage read aloud before the song does not help matters. By far the highlight of the album is the first song, “Billar.” It’s different for Ratatat. With elements of just about every noise known to man thrown against a little hip hop beat, it stands out as the most original song on the album. The album has no overall theme to it. It feels like a bunch of songs were just thrown together with no coherent synchronization. Amidst the mind numbing synths there are moments on this album that truly stand out but overall it seems a chaotic effort that has no rhyme or reason.