Magnifique is a reminder of the band’s ability to utilise familiar elements, such as melodic guitar lines and hip hop drumbeats, in a way that feels completely unique and fills your mind with curious, animated shapes. However, despite the music’s evocative nature, producer Evan Mast says visuals rarely figure into the creative process.
“Obviously afterwards when it comes to the shows we start messing around with adding a visual element, but working on the songs it’s totally just responding to the sounds. Occasionally you’ll get a video idea while you’re working on the song. But it’s never really influenced by visuals. It’s two different worlds. If anything is influencing the song, it’s usually other songs.”
There were a handful of years between Magnifique and LP4, but whenever you hear a Ratatat song it doesn’t take long to pick up on who’s behind it. This could be due to the interlocking guitar melodies and multi-guitar effects, hip hop beats and unique drum production, or the contrast between slow burning verses and explosive chorus sections. However, it can’t be pinned down to any one component.
“It’s funny, we’ll make songs that to us feel so completely different than anything we’ve ever done before but when we play them to other people they know right away that it’s us,” Mast says. “I think that there’s just something to the types of melodies that we write. I don’t know what it is, but it seems like whenever we make a song people know that it’s Ratatat, even if it’s something that feels way out of character.
“There’s obviously certain sounds that we are drawn to, that we come back to often, like the guitar harmony and the hip hop beats and stuff like that. But we never really limit ourselves. When we sit down to make a song, the only limitation is that it’s instrumental basically. Beyond that it’s open to anything.”
Mast and his co-pilot Mike Stroud set a high standard with their first four LPs, dating back to 2004’s self-titled debut. While Ratatat do have an immediately recognisable sound, there’d be no point releasing new music if it was simply a repeat. Accordingly, Magnifique contains several novel additions to the band’s armoury. Songs such as Magnifique and Drift utilise melody in a more subtle way; Nightclub Amnesia is a neon-lights electro funk number; Rome puts the focus on keyboards and bass; and the album concludes with the melancholic slide guitars of I Will Return. However, rather than attempting a drastic creative rejig, they were driven by a simpler goal.
“We’re just trying to stay excited and entertained,” Mast says. “So usually that means discovering a new sound or discovering a new way to write a song or a new type of structure. Just pulling from our bag of tricks and assembling a track is not enough – we have to introduce some new element with each song or else it’s just boring.”
This ethos was especially apparent on the two LPs that preceded Magnifique – 2008’s LP3 and 2010’s LP4 – which actively sought to bend the boundaries of the Ratatat sound. By contrast, they had a more straightforward aim for Magnifique.
“With this record the lead melodies were something that we put the most into,” Mast says. “We really wanted it to be more about guitar this time than the previous two. We’d been messing with other types of instruments and experimenting with production in general – different textures, different sounds, different ways of recording things. This time around we were trying to simplify the palette a little bit. When you do that it forces you to make the songwriting more complex. Not even necessarily more complex, but to give it a different level of attention.
“We did actually discuss, ‘OK, we want this to be a bit more of a guitar record.’ Sometimes we’ll talk about, ‘We should make this type of song – let’s make a really aggressive song. Let’s make something that sounds like pop.’ Every once in a while we’ll have an idea like that, but inevitably it doesn’t end up working that way. I feel like when you start a song, once there’s a spark, the song already knows where it wants to go. You just have to figure out what that is. To a certain degree you don’t really feel in control. And it’s better if you’re not trying to push it somewhere, and just let the song tell you what to do.”
Ratatat have always been a difficult band to categorise. Their music isn’t utterly alien – in fact, with its melodic emphasis and foundations in rock band instrumentation, it’s really quite accessible. But they’ve never been interested in using instruments in a conventional way.
“Even when we first started the band we were always trying to look for the outer limits of what a guitar could do. Sometimes we’d write a part on guitar and record it and it was like, ‘OK it sounds too much like a guitar. How can we make that more interesting?’ That’s when we got really into recording backwards guitar parts – writing the part forwards and learning how to play it backwards by recording it and reversing it. We were always pushing to see how weird we could make the guitar sound, how much we could make it sound like a keyboard or whatever.
“With Magnifique it was bringing it back to guitars, but we were still trying to see what we could do with guitars that we hadn’t done before. I got really into studying Brian May from Queen’s guitar sound. We learned a lot from that – figured out how to pack in a lot more layers of guitar than we ever had before. So that was a big discovery.”
Perhaps a less commonly discussed feature of Ratatat’s sonic identity is the drum production. The majority of songs on Magnifique are hugely melodic, with guitars at the forefront, and it’s also a very groovy record. But the drum sounds themselves have a sub-consciously compelling power, recalling boom bap and ‘90s dance music with a contemporary vibrancy.
“We try to make them as interesting as possible. When I first started making electronic music and putting beats together, I wouldn’t let myself use any actual drum sounds. If I wanted to have a kick, I had to record a sound that had a bass feel to it. I wouldn’t actually use a drum machine kick. When it came to starting Ratatat, I started breaking that rule and allowing myself to use actual drum sounds. But I really like incorporating all kinds of different sounds into the beats and lots of different textures.
“I love hip hop and I’ve learned so much from listening to hip hop about making beats. Right now everybody uses the same drum kit on every song. It’s just 808 kits on every single song. It’s so boring to me. There’s so many interesting things to do with drum sound and just using a stock 808 kit is such a wasted opportunity.”
Ratatat are in town this month for a bunch of headline dates around the country, as well as an appearance at next weekend’s Meredith Music Festival. Formerly a three-piece live unit, the stage setup’s been stripped back to just the band’s two core members. Ratatat songs tend to be very precise, almost like pop songs, and they honour the recorded forms on-stage.
“If you’re an instrumental band, a lot of people assume you’re just going to jam out – you’re going to do 15 minute versions of all the songs and just wail. The songs aren’t written that way. The structure is really important to the song. The chorus and the verse is going to hit at a certain moment, and if it doesn’t the song is worse for it. There are certain places where it feels appropriate to do some improvising, but we try to stay true to the song.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
