10/05/2006

Ratatat


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Originally uploaded by bensmithson.
so I went to see Ratatat last night at the Black Cat and they were fantastic, the best show I've seen in a long time. It's just three guys with a keyboard, guitar and bass (plus a drum machine, fog machine, and light show) and they tore the room apart. The music is entirely instrumental and most of the songs build before exploding into chunky guitar riffs and keyboard blasts. A lot of the first album is repetitive, in a good way, and kind of reminds me of video game music (specifically Castlevania for some reason), and the other songs they played were also really good. I especially like "Crips" and "Wildcat", which is on their myspace page. The music sounded great live too, the extra volume and fuzz and pretty energetic playing made stuff I like really great. The intro to "Seventeen Years" was probably the closest I've seen the Black Cat to going completely crazy.


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Andrew. Funny: I found this page when Googling "ratatat 'video game music'". What I wanted was another band sort of like Ratatat. Realizing their sound was a bit like video game music, I thought that people who also thought of their music this way might know of similar sounding bands. Anyway, as I was clicking to page 2 of the search results, I noticed a result saying someone had seen them at the Black Cat. I thought to myself, "Oh, I've been there." As page 2 loaded, I thought: "How self-centered of me to think that of all the 'Black Cat' music venues that must be out there, this guy is referring to the one I've visited." So I went back to page 1 and went to your blog entry. Not only did I find it was the same Black Cat I had once visited; I also saw that the post was written by someone I had known in high school. Pretty wild. I hope you're doing well. Owen

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