Now I have mixed feelings about Ratatat in the first place. They've got a really awesome sound, but it's kind of monotonous. If you listen to the first track of their first album, you've pretty much heard the sum of their first two.
Because I've had Project Runway stuck on my mind (I'm watching the season 1 finale right now), I'm gonna do a fashion analogy. It's like they have one dress that they redesign over and over again. The first album was a fantastic showcase that showed that they were new and fresh. Then, the second one came out, and it was basically a watered-down version of the same thing with a few extra bits tacked on. Now comes the third album. This is like the crazy deconstructed dress with all sorts of crap tacked on. You know it's all over the place, but you can still see the original design and you guiltily think that it's actually kind of fabulous.
To describe the album, I'd have to go into Ratatat's sound. They are semi-electronic, with a lot of layered and looped guitar. They also like to take inspiration from baroque music. You can totally hear a Bach fugue in some of their songs. Unfortunately, they didn't really do anything different in their first two albums. I think that probably the second didn't do too well, and so tried to shake things up with the new album. It feels basically like they did their usual thing, and then cut it up and pasted it together differently, with lots of effects and added beats. However, I think that they did it really well, even if some of it seems a little derivative (for example, the heavily vocodered vocals in the second track). And although you can hear a lot of the same stuff, it's more like they're adding their personal touch than that they're doing the same thing again.
Besides, they use an autoharp and mix harpsichord with a hip-hop beat. They totally get 10 awesome points for that.
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