Category: Culture

I saw Ratatat and Clin­ic at the Grog Shop last evening. Ratatat was sur­pris­ing­ly good. Just two guys and their gui­tars, some groovy bells and whis­tles [and a cool pro­ject­ed psy­che­del­ic accom­pa­ni­ment] and lots of jam­ming. They did­n’t have any lyrics but since each song seemed like a blend of exper­i­ment, impro­vi­sa­tion and vir­tu­os­i­ty, words prob­a­bly would­n’t have helped them much. The gui­tarist in charge was ham­mered and was know­ing­ly mak­ing lame com­ments to the crowd. He also invit­ed peo­ple to come up on stage and dance around. Only one crazy [and I do mean crazy] guy took them up on it and he stayed up there the rest of their set and did weirdo robot move­ments. The drunk gui­tar guy sin­cere­ly thanked him after­ward.

Ratatat is the kind of band that I would like to do the sound­track for one of the movies I’ve not yet made. Last night I could­n’t real­ly think of some­thing off of the top of my head for the type of film it need­ed to be but after some thought I think that per­haps ‘Con­ve­nience Charge’ could be adapt­ed to work with some­thing like it.

Clin­ic was much as I expect­ed them to be. 4 Brits in sur­gi­cal scrubs and masks, jam­ming away. I was a bit sur­prised at just how much of The Beach Boys/surfer rock vibe that their gui­tars had. That nev­er real­ly came through to me on any of their albums. Inci­den­tal­ly, I did­n’t real­ize they released their newest album a few months ago. From what I heard live, it sounds promis­ing.

We bailed a bit ear­ly because we had to get up ear­ly for work, and so I am a bit grog­gy still. In an hour I get a back mas­sage though. Ver’ nice. I also think that the overuse of the word ‘like’ in descrip­tion and con­ver­sa­tion is noth­ing more than an abort­ed attempt at metaphor. Per­haps if folks were a bit quick­er on their feet and could come up with an appro­pri­ate metaphor, ‘like’ would­n’t be so, like, annoy­ing. The schools must change! or some­thing.