Track of the Moment: Alps by Ratatat

If you haven’t heard of Ratatat, I imagine that there's a government death squad on the way to your house for admitting that. However, I’m here to keep you alive (so you can totally come back and keep reading these posts. And because I love you). So, music.

Ratatat is made up of Mike Stroud on guitar and Evan Mast on bass and synth (they hire a bassist when they tour). They solely play instrumentals and they record out of Brooklyn, so you know that their hipster cred is way up. They currently have 5 albums out, and 2 remixes, where they remixed their own songs and put various rap vocals on top of them, and all of them are fantastic. They’re also gearing up for a new album between now and December 21, 2012, so you’ll have one more shot of listening to some new, awesome music before the world ends.

For those whose lives are being saved right now, Ratatat has been used and sampled for a variety of hip-hop beats, most notably for a bunch of Kid Cudi’s songs (yeah, I’m a huge Kid Cudi fan. Come at me bro). It’s easy to see why they would have such an influence on Cudi, given his rock and spacey electronic leanings.

They come with some fairly hard bassline, amazing chords, and fantastic synthesizers. It’s hard to describe exactly what they sound like other than that, because they morph their sound on almost every track, but still identifiable as uniquely Ratatat. They can go from fun to calming to very…I guess cute would have to be the word to describe it. Anyway, they’re a fantastic duo, and you definitely need to have them on your sound playing devices.