Loud Pipes

Ratatat are Mike Stroud and Evan Mast, a New York duo who built a distinctive sound around guitars treated to sound like synthesizers and synthesizers treated to sound like guitars, overlaid with samples and processed drums. Their music is almost impossible to describe to someone who hasn't heard it, and immediately recognizable to someone who has.

Loud Pipes, from Classics (2006), is their most purely joyful track: a bassline that could come from a hip-hop record, a guitar line that sounds like it was generated by a machine dreaming about guitars, the whole thing building with the single-minded momentum of a song that knows exactly where it's going.

Ratatat's catalog is more consistent than their profile suggests — a band who found a sound fully formed and inhabited it without repeating themselves. Classics is the most accomplished statement of what they were.