by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

It takes a lot of balls for two shaggy dudes to call their second album, or any album, Classics. But New York City’s Ratatat, which is the duo of guitarist Mike Stroud and bassist Evan Mast (plus keyboardist Jacob Morris, when on tour), have earned the right.

Their eponymous 2004 debut established the band’s modus operandi, with layers of slick, pulsating guitars slathering magisterial classical melodies over thick, crunchy beats (Ratatat have also nailed down a parallel career as remixers, giving Missy, Dizzee and Jay-Z their special makeover). But if Ratatat established the theory, the brand-new Classics shows just where the application can lead, reconciling grooviness and grandeur to consistently magnificent effect.

Mirror: Your debut was impressive enough, but Classics is an exponentially better album.

Mike Stroud: Cool (laughs). I’m getting sick of it.

M: I’d imagine that better recording facilities contributed to the improvement, but I’m sure there’s more to it than that.

MS: Well, we actually recorded a lot of it in the same room. I don’t think it’s necessarily the room, it’s more production techniques, and the songwriting got better too. Also, we recorded everything live this time. Not live, with like 20 people in the room, but the first record had a lot of loops and stuff. We’d record one thing and loop it, and now we play the whole thing all the way through. Just little things like that. We used amps this time—everything on the first record was just direct, plugged right into the computer, which doesn’t sound that great.

M: There are also a lot more ideas going on in there—disco, lounge and all these things pop up. Were you allowing yourselves to experiment more?

MS: Yeah, for sure. We were trying to push it to the next level. There’s a certain amount of pressure when you have a second record, so we definitely experimented a lot more, and spent a lot more time on every song. The first record, most of the songs were made in a day or two, so we spent weeks and really got into each song this time.

M: In reviews and interviews, the rock and hip hop dimensions of Ratatat are what get focused on. The baroque classical music that informs the melodies is largely ignored, which seems odd to me because I see it as the core of the tunes.

MS: Isn’t that weird? I never agree with any of those categories, like rock and hip hop. I’m always annoyed by that. Yeah, I feel it’s much more baroque-influenced, like Bach.

Six strings to 60

M: I understand you’re big into the Kinks and their contemporaries, and I can certainly hear it, or more specifically, mid-period Beatles and George Martin’s production, in the tune “Tropicana.” Was that what you were after there?

MS: Yeah, it’s very Beatles-y (laughs). It’s funny, Evan made me a CD with just drums on it, probably like 20 beats. I’d been listening to it, and I’d been watching that Beatles Anthology. After that, I was listening through and found this one beat and that song just popped into my head. It’s sort of influenced by “I Am the Walrus.” Hopefully it’s not too much of a rip-off (laughs).

M: Maybe I’m just a little too easily amused, but I also detect an element of humour in Ratatat’s music, things like the cat yowl in “Wildcat,” or the song title “Tacobel Canon.” Is joking around part of your creative process?

MS: We’re just trying to have fun. Even with the last album too. Songs like “Seventeen Years,” we thought were pretty funny. I don’t think we’re trying to be a funny band, not like Ween or anything. It just comes through, because we’re silly dudes (chuckles).

M: You’ve said that doing your music entirely live would require a Ted Nugent-style army of guitars, which seems generally unfeasible, but I understand you might just try to do that at a Swiss festival. What’s up with that?

MS: If we can get it together, there’s this festival in Fribourg, and they invited us back. They invited us back and said, “Maybe next time, you can bring 10 guitar players.” It’s actually hard to find good guitar players around who aren’t taken, in bands or whatever. If we could get it together and somehow pay everybody, it would be fun. I mean, we’re bringing an organ player on this tour—this guy Jacob Morris, he plays in the Matador band the Double—but I’m still the only one playing guitar for now. n

With Envelopes and Panther at les Saints
tonight, Thursday, Sept. 7, 9 p.m., $13.50

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