{"id":78,"date":"2006-10-03T08:54:50","date_gmt":"2006-10-03T13:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dilettantes.code4lib.org\/2006\/10\/03\/m\/"},"modified":"2006-10-03T08:54:50","modified_gmt":"2006-10-03T13:54:50","slug":"m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/2006\/10\/m\/","title":{"rendered":"\\m\/"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went to RATATAT<\/a> last night at the EARL<\/a>.\u00a0 Anyone who has talked to me about music in last several months would know how completely obsessed I have been with them.\u00a0 I’ve turned (or tried to turn) almost everybody near me on to them.\u00a0 I had been anticipating this show since I saw it listed, despite being a Monday night, despite knowing that the EARL meant they weren’t going on until until midnight.<\/p>\n

And yet, despite all this fanboy-ness, I can’t believe how much I had wrong about them.\u00a0 First off, I wasn’t pronouncing their name correctly (it’s ‘radda-dat’, not ‘rat-tat-tat’); Evan Mast is, in fact, the less-strung-out-looking one<\/a>; and that people will crowd a club to see a band that has no<\/em> lyrics (although they have been getting a bit of airplay here lately).<\/p>\n

The thing that took me most by surprise, though, was how wrong I got their music.\u00a0 I have been listening to the first album near constantly for months and ‘Classics’ has joined it since its release — it’s not as if I’m only passingly familiar with their sound.\u00a0 When I first heard them, I thought they sounded like the music from a splashscreen from a Commodore-64 game (then I found the Advantage<\/a> and realized what game music really<\/em> sounds like).\u00a0 Later I just thought they sounded like incredibly good hipster soundtrack music — perfect for when Selena and I are sitting on the porch, watching the crackheads walk by, maybe^Wprobably drinking a cocktail (like every we do every evening) — seamlessly shuffling with the likes of Lali Puna<\/a> and Madlib<\/a> to set a good sonic backdrop to observe the universe through ironic and cynical lenses.<\/p>\n

Yeah, well, that’s not the kind of band they are.\u00a0 RATATAT, friends, is a balls-to-the-wall heavy metal band.\u00a0 This amp goes to eleven.\u00a0 Oh sure, you knew the influence<\/em> was there:\u00a0 Germany-to-Germany, Lex, Seventeen Years… yes, sure, you could hear the guitars and the inspiration.\u00a0 The photos<\/a> and logo<\/a> lent tongue-in-cheek references to the cock-rock culture.\u00a0 Well, live and in person, the ‘references’ and ‘influence’ give way to ‘reality’.\u00a0 Think ‘Helloween<\/a>‘ without the vocals.\u00a0 Also think of them being awesome.\u00a0 And sort of art-y.\u00a0 Maybe even more rocking.<\/p>\n

Yes, this was a metal show – replete with headbanging, faux pyrotechnics (nice touch, I might add) and mod\/ironic imagery projected on a screen<\/a> (well, sheet, really) behind them. Everything was much faster and the guitars much<\/em> louder and more distorted.\u00a0 “Nostrand”, which exemplified my ‘chilling with a cocktail’ view of them became a driving anthem.\u00a0 “Gettysburg”‘s guitars were cranked up furiously changing the tone to near-thrash.\u00a0 “Lex” was bedlam; I had no idea how much this song just blazes<\/em>– projected on the screen was a person smashing the windshield of a car (the camera was in the passenger seat) which looped continously on the measure.<\/p>\n

And yet it was still most definitely RATATAT.\u00a0 “Wildcat” was still the crowd pleaser (as was “Seventeen Years”) with the projection of the cat head icon<\/a> whenever the ‘mrowr’ sound went.\u00a0 “Cherry” was still just smooth, wide, crescendo.\u00a0 They played almost the entirety of both albums.<\/p>\n

Yeah, they are must-see.\u00a0 And if you don’t have either of their albums, yet, have I told you how much I’m into them?<\/p>\n

Skip the opener, the Envelopes<\/a>, though, man, they suck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went to RATATAT last night at the EARL.\u00a0 Anyone who has talked to me about music in last several months would know how completely obsessed I have been with them.\u00a0 I’ve turned (or tried to turn) almost everybody near me on to them.\u00a0 I had been anticipating this show since I saw it listed, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rossfsinger.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}