‘Pricks of Brightness’ starts as a soporific ‘Barely Legal’ and quickly becomes a Brian May solo transposed to keyboards.
Breakdowns punctuate tracks cheekily with filtered percussion and of course the door-filter makes several welcome appearances throughout. This is a Ratatat album through-and-through, but there is enough within the arrangements to keep it fresh. Or perhaps we’re just happy to have them back? While you strut to the bass hook and plucked guitars of ‘Cream On Chrome’, a part of you wants some strings in there, some counterpoints to the crunching chords of the chorus-section… although there is also a massively rockin’ tabla section in the song. Maybe, after five years, a listener might want an evolution somewhere. That’s where complacency could be charged at the band - although if it ain’t broke? Yet, if we accept the Daft Punk-Strokes comparison, it’s one that can easily be applied to all of their albums. Similarly the bobbing keyboard line and Lemon Jelly guitar-hula of ‘Drift’ is blissful in its own Haitian-lounge way: chill out music for attendees of Comic-Con rather than the tastelessly wealthy.
Ratatat know all too well the power of the twin guitar solo and how a high guitar line can indeed sound wonderfully strange when changing from major to minor. ‘Abrasive’ in particular, is glorious with its melancholy hooks and four-to-the-floor kick drum. To crudely splurge a review into a sentence, this is an album of Daft Punk guitar solos and Strokes-style angled baselines - an hour of heaven. The melodies are still cinematic and sweeping while the production is playfully immersive. Well, no… or predominantly no… or more accurately who cares when it’s this good? Magnifique is excellent and comes after a five-year rest since last set LP4. They’ve been pumping out tunes since 2004, well before EDM became the industry’s snack-of-choice and their native Brooklyn became (quite) so trendy.īut with 11 years of increasingly refined space-rock, is complacency creeping in? They make electronic power-pop (or is it funk rock?) that has a hefty sonic sheen without being an EDM-shaped serotonin bomb. The main criticism of this album may come in that plain lack of variance in the tracks - if the lead singles 'Cream on Chrome' and the aforementioned 'Abrasive' don't do much for you, this album as a whole assuredly won't.Īnd there's something frustrating in this, as when they do drop the odd curveball, such as the I-Monster-esque dreamy zombie plod of 'Drift', or the AIR-meets-Beatles bliss of 'I Will Return' - the feeling lingers that they're capable of painting from a much wider palette.US duo Ratatat really are great. Tracks like 'Primetime' and 'Abrasive' are frankly akin to melting a Brian May solo over the top of a Daft Punk instrumental. Ratatat don't write songs, they write fun little ideas that transform into earworms.Ī quick flick through the duo's previous records shows that 'Magnifique' doesn't reinvent their own wheel, let alone challenge elsewhere on the electronica spectrum, but one doesn't get the feeling that's the intention of this album.Ĭombining tight, tinny, squealing leads and stomping, simplistic, almost glam-dance percussion, the vast majority of the tracks on offer here glide and bounce, staying just interesting enough to transcend pleasant background music.
Review Summary: Like Daft Punk and The Strokes having hip, metrosexual babies.
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