With a third solo album that sits gently in anachronism, Evan Mast, half of Ratatat, grants himself a rejuvenating elixir by tracing the essence of his own musical DNA.
Since Ratatat’s fifth and, to date, final album Magnifique (2015) arrived, Evan Mast, one of the duo’s two driving minds, has used this prolonged (and open‑ended) hiatus to take a step back and peer into the past. In a symbolic move, twenty years after the group’s first release at the dawn of the new millennium, he issued a second solo album under the alias E.Vax (E.Vax, 2021): a youth‑restoring tonic after he had creatively exhausted himself alongside his partner Mike Stroud.
The question of this revived vitality lies at the beating heart of this third album. In the artist’s own admission, Just like Fire is the product of an attempt to reconnect with the immediacy of creation and the intensity of his earliest musical inspirations. Initially a tribute to sampling, before being overtaken by questions of rights, the record evolved into a deeply personal quest at the core of his musical DNA.
A Certain Idea of the Future
There is something of the nostalgia for sampling à la Avalanches, and of the post‑dubstep sensibilities of Burial and James Blake, that slips into this work. Elsewhere, the ghosts of chillwave, which Ratatat had anticipated a few years earlier, and a reverence for the roots of house music drift through this gently anachronistic album. A fragile, melancholic tightrope is held aloft so as not to drift into the passé, thanks to the pristine expressivity of Mast’s guitar work—an instrument that will forever embody a certain idea of the future.
Just like Fire (Perfect Branch/Because). Release on 26 June.
