It is difficult to make it through a listening of Ratatat’s adroitly titled third album, LP3, without involving the rest your senses. The creepy keyboard choir of “Flynn” aside, LP3 is entirely wordless, and songs like the clubby “Shempi” and sunny “Bruleé [sic]” pull for the addition of rhymes and choruses. Many tracks are similarly visual: the pulsing synth, staccato percussion, and Spanish guitar of “Mi Viejo” evoke the apparition of ancestral skeletons tap dancing across a worn, wooden porch. Several pieces also provoke movement, though more often a subtle toe-tapping or self-conscious, hipster twitching than full-on rocking out.
About a third of the way into LP3, though, it begins to feel like it’s time to up the multitasking—there’s always laundry to be done and the car could probably use a washing. The ambient electronic collaborations of guitarist Mike Stroud and programmer/producer Evan Mast fit best in a few places where you may have already encountered them or something similar: video games, movie montages, and ultramodern car commercials. These are also good sounds to frame weekend housework or late-night highway driving in rainstorms, and your level of satisfaction with LP3 may well be related to what you expect to do with it.
This album represents Ratatat’s attempt to diversify, and diversity to Ratatat means amassing mounds of disparate instruments, elements, samples, and styles, and seamlessly reassembling them to make songs that sound like they could have been created in a more organic manner. Examined up close, the patchwork is impressive, thoughtful, and textured. From across the room, LP3’s melodic collections of beeps, beats, riffs, and whirs function more effectively as backdrops than focal points.
Occasionally, a song will re-command attention, such as “Mumtaz Khan,” which effectively advances its menacing motif with live rhythm and an arena rock guitar solo. But in general, while the EQ and execution on most tracks are fairly flawless, it is difficult not to wish that Ratatat would more often push the dynamics of the composition or err on the side of analog imperfection, as in the engaging but aimlessly urgent gallop of “Gipsy Threat,” which opts to loop and fade rather than build, resolve, or collapse. Midrange selections such as “Bird Priest,” “Dura,” and “Black Heroes” also circulate on autopilot, sounding a little too much like the remixed products of a meticulous college student with a Casio and a computer.
With the majority of tracks in the two- to three-minute range, LP3 does avoid trancing out or belaboring its points, and criticizing the album for being background music and cell phone ringtones might be a bit like complaining that tea doesn’t taste like whiskey. Ratatat appears too talented in its crafting for the diffuse atmosphere of its latest release to be less than deliberate, and it falls instead upon the listener to add the missing ingredients: lyrics, images, dance moves, or perhaps just this afternoon’s grocery list. As a soundtrack to such things, LP3 flows through its playlist with little effort and fewer faults.