Jason Collett - Rat A Tat Tat

Once a member of Canadian indie powerhouse Broken Social Scene, Jason Collett has been harnessing his inner soloist over four albums. With his fifth, Rat A Tat Tat, Collett proves himself a singer-songwriter of tremendous standing.

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He’s passed the landmark age of 40, toured the world with definitive Canadian indie outfit Broken Social Scene and dabbled in alt-country musings for his past three solo albums. Now, Jason Collett is back with another in Rat A Tat Tat; a sprawling, genre-blending combination of sounds with Arts & Crafts label-mates Zeus as his backing band. In Rat A Tat Tat, Collett has assembled a handful of blissful tunes that go from shades of funk to shades of country, folk to pop and rock to disco in about the same amount of time it takes you to ask just why we’ve never heard of him down here in Australia.

Indeed, with each listen, that becomes an increasingly appropriate question. From the hauntingly pretty folk opener Rave on Sad Songs to the playful, unclassifiable album closer Vanderpool Vanderpool, Rat A Tat Tat proves itself an instant satisfier. If you’re the background music type, you’ll find this impossible not to participate in, particularly once it pulls you into its groove. On The Slowest Dance, Collett is his own salesman, inviting you with the lines “I will open a bottle, I will fill your glass, and we will dance,” and if you’re not moving at least some kind of limb throughout this album’s duration, then you should adjust your hearing aid. Where Love Is a Dirty Word is just about the most head-nod worthy track you’ll hear this year, Cold Blue Halo is that breezy sunset foot-tapper that spreads the smile across your beer-cooled lips. It’s an album for all occasions and with the New Year approaching, there are plenty of occasions coming up for this album to nestle into.

This an album with a great sense of range, presenting Collett as a successful dabbler in dark and light. He foils his distinct nasal moan against the plodding piano line backing High Summer equally as well as he does “sleepwalking with skeleton keys jangling” on Winnipeg Winds. Meanwhile, Long May You Love somehow manages to make a spaghetti-western intro soar into a rollicking chorus with the complete absence of cheese. Bitch City defies its title for some of the most unique images on the record. Possessing lines like “she aint that pretty, but she knows how to howl; that hollow high cheekbone moan” mingle with “you gotta walk light when you’re stepping in shit” to create strange visuals amongst the somewhat incongruous musical backing, plodding before descending into neo-carnival keys and effects to bizarrely intriguing consequence. Then, when it all ends in the line “bitch city blowing smoke in your eyes, all bloodshot with love,” you’re left with the very same dichotomy the song’s going for…that naivety of falling for a place far from home that you can never quite see for what it is. It’s the effect of tracks like this that make Rat A Tat Tat such a gem, layering all its noises over sharply written lyrics and a variety of stylistic sensibilities to draw you into its lush aural interior.

Sure, there’s some pretty flowery language back there, but Rat A Tat Tat is an album that does a pretty impressive job of instigating hyperbole. With faultless backing and production by Zeus and a great sense of structure and melody by Collett, this is an album more than worth getting your hands on. Rat A Tat Tat is pop without the sheen, country without the pick-strum, dance without the synths and folk with a party attached. It tiptoes a line where countless genres meet and comes out the other end without ever having languished in the middle of the road, and it’s that which makes Rat A Tat Tat one of the finest releases of 2010.

Jason Collett’s Rat A Tat Tat is out now on ABC Music, distributed by Universal.