Ratner's Star are pleased to announce the imminent release of their third studio album, Fear of Modern Life. The album was recorded and produced by the band alone in a converted loft space over a disused abatoir next door to a homeless shelter in New York's notorious meat packing district over a number of months. Fear of Modern Life comes hot on the heels of the band's million-plus selling self titled debut and the U.K. and U.S. Top 3 sophmore album Further Thoughts About Politics and Culture.
Work on the record started not long after the tour in support of Further Thoughts... had been completed, the band reconvening to New York and spending a month or so converting a rented attic space into a recording studio and listening through demos that each member of the band had made using porta-studio's and cassette tape recorders while on tour. At first, the main instrumentalists in the group worked together in jamming sessions to create fifteen instrumental tracks, which singer and lyricist Jonathan Foster Frantzen listened to and assessed for suitability. It was then down to him to write the lyrics, which the group then fitted to the most appropriate tracks. The working title of the album was #3, but over time other suggestions were made, including "Everything's So Crazy It's Normal", The American Book of The Dead, The Modern Dark Ages, and Bunker Mentality.
The new album is a significant change in direction for the group, with a darker, more downbeat and instrospective tone to singer Jonathan Foster Frantzen's lyrics and a more oppressive and overbearing feel to much of the record's production, with very little space in the densely packed rhythm section and a heavier overall feel without reliance upon distortion and multiple overdubs. "It's about an unspoken fear in the world at the moment, the fear of modernity and the state things are in...and a desire to live in the past or to just not exist at all," states Frantzen. "People try to find forms of escape from the things they fear and the trend towards a boring overload of pointless information through work, technology, sex, marriage, criminal behaviour and drugs, and the songs on the album deal with all of that...consider it thus: postmodern introspective alienation that you can dance to."
Fear of Modern Life marks the first time that the band has collaborated with outsiders on their music from the writing period through recording in the studio and the final stages of production and mixing: the opening track Play Ball and the spooky minimalism of Transcript feature new-wave inflected guitar contributions from Favorite Son, guitarist in The Prisoners; additional instrumentation and bits of production also provided by local New York based New-No-Wave scene figure Johnny Fingers on keyboards during Living Under Gunfire; Harlem gospel eight piece the Twist Sisters provide backing vocals and chants on Play Ball, Afterlife and Documents; New York based solo artist and noted funk bassist Buster Jaww jams alongside Ratner's Star bassist Alexei Wright on Hold Those Thoughts and Urban Space; and Cuban percussionist brothers Jerry and Che Marquez-Allegre pop up on several tracks providing additional drumming, percussion and rhythm.
The resulting album is a complicated yet strangely alluring listen, full of odd patterns, lyrical mysteries, strange ambiences, weird sounds and subliminally funky undercurrents. The centrepiece of the record is the chilling and hypnotic semi-acoustic lament of Afterlife, which the band recorded in the disused meat freezer store room of the abatoir building.
There is no information about possible single releases from the album yet, but the official final tracklisting has been released to the press and runs as follows:
Play Ball (3:06)
Documents (4:12)
Mind (2:36)
Hold Those Thoughts (4:05)
Afterlife (4:01)
Urban Space (4:07)
Transcript (3:34)
Living Under Gunfire (3:45)
Synthesizer (2:59)
The Broom Of The System (5:13)
The band is set to announce details of a tour in support of the album, which will include some of the contributing performers playing aloneside the band in an expanded version of its line-up, very soon.
