Ratatat @ White Heat, 30/01/2007

Ratatat @ White Heat, Madame Jojo’s
30^th January 2007

The first gig of Ratatat’s current UK tour and the basement of Madame Jojo’s is packed out and sweltering. There’s a scruffy, bug-eyed kid at the front who spends the whole set limply waving his arm and a hundred more absently nodding heads and swaying shoulders. It must be true - ambient electronica is back!

Synth-maestro and brains behind the outfit Evan Mast produces the kind of hypnotic beats you usually hear in the early hours at a friend of a friend’s house party. Without lyrics to interrupt the crowd’s dreamy reverie, the kids at the front are absorbed in the projected shape-shifter visuals, the equivalent of 'getting lost in the visualizer’ on the laptop at said house party. Imagine shuffling dustbin lid percussion, raw hi-hats and guitar noodling ripped from Daft Punk’s ‘Aerodynamic’ courtesy of guitarist Mike Stroud, all tempered by countless melodic intricacies and a dose of melancholy.

If you haven’t already heard Ratatat’s blistering single ‘Wildcat’ then go and get it right now; if you have then don’t be surprised to find the rest of the new album ‘Classics’ more like a stoned hour of Tetris than a compendium of glittery electro bangers.