'The Window' by Ratboys
Ratboys manage to be unself-conscious indie-rock classicists and curators who very evidently feel free to enlarge the subgenre. The Window, their proper follow-up to 2020’s Printer’s Devil (2021’s Happy Birthday, Ratboy combined re-recordings with rarities), finds them relaxing into that freedom.
Another curator, although perhaps not another classicist, is helpful: Chris Walla, a friendly former member of Death Cab for Cutie, comes on as recorder, producer, and co-mixer, and brings Ratboys from Chicago to Seattle.
The brief relocation doesn’t openly manifest in the music, although The Window launches vigorously with “Making Noise for the Ones You Love,” a feedback-drenched bottle rocket that recalls both the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” and the confidence of Belly’s second album, 1995’s King.
On this opener, as on the rest of the album, Julia Steiner establishes a vocal presence at once gorgeously girlish and casually cool, as if splicing the aforementioned Belly’s Tanya Donelly with the Breeders’ Kim Deal, plus a welcome McCartney-meets-McGuinn melodicism.
It’s not just her melodicism, because Ratboys hold collective songwriting credit, and guitarist Dave Sagan, bassist Sean Neumann, and drummer Marcus Nuccio enrich the material, whether crunching grungily through the extended refrains in “No Way,” mingling vintage electronics with organic arpeggios on “Break,” or twirling along the avenue within the chimes of “Morning Zoo.”
The intended culmination of the collaboration and expansion—within the band and with Walla—is “Black Earth, WI,” which in eight and a half minutes has time enough for cosmic-country funk, campfire singalongs, and peculiar nursery rhymes. It’s more a short song that goes on for three times its length than it is a natural epic, but it’s also a pleasant breeze.
And The Window closes with a shorter number, “Bad Reaction,” leaving Steiner’s repeated question—“What’s the one thing you love?”—in the inner ear as the light-blue folk aura fades. Ratboys answer that question enigmatically, with serious prettiness.
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