The third album by Dutch post-punk weirdos
Rats on Rafts is partially inspired by the band's 2018 tour of Japan, performing in arenas opening for
Franz Ferdinand. Expanding on their previous record's textural noise-rock sound, the long-in-the-making, extravagantly titled
Excerpts from Chapter 3: The Mind Runs a Net of Rabbit Paths is an ambitious quasi-opera pulling from Krautrock, psychedelia, and avant-garde pop in the vein of
Van Dyke Parks and
Scott Walker. Threaded throughout the songs are sound effects representing the elements, ranted narratives, and dreamlike interludes. Opening with a crescendo of Eastern-sounding guitar melodies, the band launch into the triumphant "A Trail of Wind and Fire," a motorik journey with a rousing chorus of "We'll destroy again!" "Tokyo Music Experience," a sleek but gritty floor-shaker, carries on in a similar manner, resembling a more
Kraftwerkian
B-52's playing in a garage full of cheap, smoking amplifiers. "The Rise and Fall of the Plague" illustrates a tale about snooping around a government warehouse in search of secret files and catching informants. The slow, swaying psych-pop of "Fragments," with its resistant battle cry "Never free," precedes "The Disappearance of Dr. Duplicate," a manic acid-punk caper laced with backwards messages and plot twists. "Where Is My Dream?" is the most cathartic moment on the album, an identity crisis tale that briefly drifts off into blissful rest before being thrust awake with nightmarish howls and furious rhythms. The final stretch of the record is its most dramatic, peaking with the
Oh Sees-like noise-prog epic "Part Two: Crossing the Desert." While it's obvious that the group put a lot of time and effort into conceptualizing the album and realizing its audacious soundscapes, it's extremely hard to follow along with the stories, and it's unclear if it's all supposed to add up to anything, and what it all means. The epilogue seems to address this, as the narrator mentions being forced to start a new life, and all of the characters he met have ended up as merely figments of his imagination. While a bit muddled and confusing, the album certainly invites the audience to listen attentively and figure out their own interpretations.