The sold out, all ages, Showbox SODO loudly embraced and got down for Ratatat’s Mike Stroud and Evan Mast. They played bass and guitar, banged on drums, and tinkered with an array of instrumentation (including an autoharp). Syncopated visuals were the highlight. A mobile network of projected kaleidoscope Escher parrots folded in and out of each other clearly and repeating like the loops in the music. See through screens on both sides of the stage were projected upon. Along with the backdrop screen, these were left and right “frontdrops.” Projected string players in George Washington white wigs and sunglasses played along on some songs which gave the backing tracks a sentient feel. Live holograms. Then tangled, undulating, wet orifice body parts and what looked to be intestines rotated and spun. What’s the plural of orifice? Orifi? Projected statues of nude women also spun on the frontdrops, then melted into cathode glitchery.

All Ratatat sound is anchored under big dimensional beats. (Hoof-wharf.) Firmly planted schemes. Some, up front, with more attack, and some more muffled, distantly working. A heavy muffle. The Ratatat beats don’t slam at your ear so much as they explode out of your chest cavity from the inside. The dimensions to the beats fit with the dimensions of the visuals. Sounds were in a thunder phase. Ratatat posits a digital parrot sway, not dub step, but kook step.

I thought some of the snugness to their sound would be lost in SODO, but it wasn’t. It was warm, and just right, with earplugs in for the second half of the set. “Wildcat” went off particularly big. The cat roar sample hit like a cymbal would. You can't beat a roar sample.

Stroud and Mast are Siamese, headbanging, t-shirt hippies. Odd, but not unfitting with the music. All songs are coated in melody that gets toward jungle at times. Guitars are huge and octavised in a Brian May type regal magnificence. It’s an inverted, arena legato-shred. Some lines dissolved into chaos and crescendo tweaking, and others were plucked and strummed with patterned funk exactness.

There was one encore and they ended the show by banging on drums with mallets. They said the extremely dancey Showbox SODO crowd was the best one of their tour so far. Here’s a glimpse: