Ratatat, Past and Future

It seems Ratatat are get­ting ready to fol­low up their 2006 sopho­more release Clas­sics, which I thought was leaps and bounds above their debut self-titled, and cer­tainly one of my favorites from that year, if not this decade. Two weeks ago they released the sin­gle Shiller, whose A-side you can lis­ten to here. Both tracks are creepy and less beat-driven than their recent stuff, for sure, and I’m glad to see them reach­ing again this time around. “Shiller” will be fea­tured on their forth­com­ing LP, LP3, which Evan Mast describes as being “wildly dif­fer­ent than any­thing we’ve done” as well as “by far the best album we’ve ever made,” in this inter­view with Audio­junkies. Hey that sounds promis­ing doesn’t it.

To sup­ple­ment this track are two oldies; the first is “What We Meant,” from Evan’s solo out­ing, Park­ing Lot Music, which he released under the name E*Vax in 2001 on his own Audio Dregs imprint. Have fun brows­ing the Way­back Machine’s archives for E*Vax, Cherry, and Ratatat, notably Cherry’s first two web­sites, the parts where Evan announces his new band, and where Cherry change their name to Ratatat on Sep­tem­ber 15, 2003.

Oh yeah, and the third track I’m includ­ing is from 9 Beats, a mys­te­ri­ous 2006 boot­leg about which lit­tle is known, but which was seem­ingly first reported by i guess im float­ing, and whose story remains at bit­ter­sweet being, and which Wikipedia reports as hav­ing been used in a CSI episode.

And finally, the cover art to LP3, sched­uled for a July 8 release date: