I hate everything about the winter - everything. It's cold, dark, isolating and generally discouraging of all that is good in the human experience. I'm from below the Mason-Dixon Line, but I've lived in New England for two years, and each November, I ask myself how I could possibly justify living in a place where the winter begins in November. To my relatively sun-tinged Midwestern sensibility, this just doesn't compute.
But, since I am a giant tool about music and am from the live music backwaters of St. Louis, I consistently answer my dilemma by pointing to Boston's status as a national Mecca for touring musicians. Whenever I get depressed about the weather here (which is always), I usually just look at Boston's Pollstar.com page, try to grab free tickets to one of the many shows I want to see, and put on a sweater.
Pardon my emo, but this semester has been tough on me, largely because the concert calendar has been as barren and desolate as the wintry landscape. Only a handful of really exciting bands have come to town since New Year's, and almost none of the shows I have seen have blown me away. As far as I'm concerned, when there's little by way of live music to compensate for its cruel, harsh weather, Boston is a sh-ty place to live in the winter.
Ratatat's appearance at Oxfam Caf?© didn't just coincide with the blessed coming of spring; it catalyzed it. First things first, I'd like to get the disclaimer out of the way: yes, I used to be the president of AppleJam, the club that sponsored the show, and yes, it was I who booked and arranged it, so call me biased if you must. But I think you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who went to the show that would disagree with my contention that it was a truly phenomenal performance and one that signaled an important shift for those of us bored with the local music scene and pissed off at the Weather Channel.
Icy winds and impassable sidewalks often have an isolating effect on those ill-suited for the winter. For me, winters here get too cold and treacherous to go anywhere, so I don't. I just hang around my house and stay under the covers of my beautiful bed for as long as I possibly can, which sucks. I like being with people, but I simply can't do it.
One of the best anti-winter effects of the Ratatat show was the crowd - literally. The tiny room holds about 75 people, but rough estimates put the assembled Ratatat faithful at well over 100. That doesn't count the 100 to 125 people from as far as Vermont and southern New York who crowded outside the Caf?©. Under normal circumstances, being in that close proximity at a show is torturous. But after months of having to force myself to make contact with humans, I welcomed the sardines-in-a-tin-can arrangement.
I especially liked the heat it produced. My hate of all things winter has engendered a love of all things non-winter, including oven-like heat, which the crammed bodies and Oxfam's low ceilings definitely produced. Had everyone in the room just been standing still, the warmth from all the bodies would have produced a temperature warm enough to help steam away my frosty memories of a winter that, by most accounts, wasn't even that bad.
But the single best part of the show was that no one, not a single body in the jam-packed room, was standing still. Inside the already-hot room was a loud, fist-pumping, sweat-drenched, dance party, one that I still can't believe was produced by only three people. Joined by a keyboardist to help them replicate the programmed beats of their studio albums, Evan Peter Mast and Mike Stroud filled the tiny room with electro-stadium-rock bangers worthy of a venue 10 times bigger than Oxfam.
During songs like "Lex," "Loud Pipes" and "17 Years," each bombastic riff, each head-banging stop-and-start and each slamming programmed bass hit bounced around the room like Flubber, hitting every concertgoer like a slap that commanded them to move their sweaty bodies until they couldn't stand up. Even the loyal out-of-towners, forced to watch the show through the room's steam-covered windows, were going completely nuts for the beat-heavy, guitar-driven madness inside.
As if the music wasn't enough, the band brought a variety of bizarre visual stimuli, adding surreality to sweat. "Nostrand," the sleeper standout track from 2006's "Classics," began with two tame, melodic minutes of build-up to a snarling, exclamatory crescendo, one made all the more propulsive by the timely flashing of strobe lights that the band had synched up to their guitars.
Great atmosphere and fantastic music notwithstanding, it was showmanship like this that made the Ratatat show a genuinely celebratory experience, a show so fun and energetic as to both melt away my winter malaise and end the city's dry spell of humdrum shows. It seems like a chance occurrence both that the Ratatat show took place a week before the first day of spring and at the beginning of Boston's exciting spring concert schedule.
But the weather and concert gods work in mysterious ways, and to the faithful, the fact that a show so diametrically opposed to the weather and the scene's atmosphere just happened to welcome both the death of winter and the rebirth of Boston's thriving local scene is too perfect to be a coincidence.
Mikey Goralink is a sophomore majoring in American studies. He can be reached at Michael.Goralnik@tufts.edu.
