Photos by Geneviève Cartier.

The oldest weapon in the battle for cultural superiority: I've known about some band much longer than you have. I'll trot that one out for Ratatat, but then I'll waste it by adding that, besides their music, I've never known anything about them at all. This is clearly one of the flaws of the digital era; without a CD insert or vinyl sleeve, your understanding of a band is limited to the sounds they make. Unless you read something, but that requires effort. Anyway, I think I accidentally read a paragraph in the week before the show that told me that there are two members, and that they come from New York. I think. But so, really, I was expecting laptops and standing around, and I was very surprised to find none, and ultimately more than just a little delighted by what happened instead.

What happened was this: there were three of them, first of all (which means the paragraph I read was wrong, or else the third guy is a touring accessory), and they were all scraggly rock guys, with the keyboardist (the accessory, I'm pretty sure) sporting a bad Strokes-style afro. The other two held guitar and bass, and they proceeded to rock. With the first bass note plucked, my concept of the band changed completely, and not just because it was so heavy that I could feel it reverberating in my ribcage. OK, maybe just because of that.

Clarification: Ratatat are an instrumental band, unless you count the wildcat yowl in Wildcat as vocals, and the drum tracks on their songs were being created by something, somehow, which suggests laptops, or else maybe some kind of laptop- ported-into-Strokes-Afro'd-keyboardist's-keyboard setup. Visually, though, there were no laptops.

The main observation I made about Ratatat, which had never been apparent to me in the past, is that this band was clearly created in an attempt to explore ways that someone could noodle on a guitar for entire songs without the result being annoying or hilarious. Ratatat's songs are 3- and 4-minute noodlefests, essentially, but never stray into Yngwie Malmsteen-style bathos. They've found some kind of way around that. Maybe it's just the sheer force of their assault. Every time guitar guy stomped a certain pedal (which was probably just some kind of distortion pedal but which I began to refer to in my head as the kill-everyone-now pedal) and ripped out several bars of sonic destruction, it seemed impossible that three people could be producing something so profound and so heavy.

(The letdown came on a few occasions when that illusion was exposed; once or twice, it was quite apparent that the doubled and quintupled guitar lines, which more or less define Ratatat's sound, weren't always being produced through some magical pedal, but were in fact pre-recorded and maybe coming from Strokes-Afro'd-keyboardist's setup.)

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