Ratbyte 7"; Ratbyte/ Clusterfuck split 7" et al.

I wanted this blog to act as an excuse for me to pay more attention to newer bands as well as letting me sound off about older ones I'd like to pay some lip service to. So far, it seems to be working out for me.

I don't know all that much about Connecticut's Ratbyte, but I came across their page on myspace, liked what I heard and started writing with Mike, who was nice enough to get me some copies of their stuff. I'm quite glad that he did. So far, the band has a split 7" with CFL, a 7" of their own, and another more recent split 7" with Clusterfuck. All of these are quality and all of them are split releases between FNS Records and Partytime Records, with the exception of the Clusterfuck split which is solely on Partytime. (Clusterfuck ain't half bad either.)

They play a nice brand of skate punk that 10 years ago you'd have been hard pressed to find on the East Coast. They have a bit of a West Coast flavor to them; mid to fast paced songs with somewhat generic lyrics that sound like they'd been written by some bored teenagers with too much energy (like "My Boss is a Jerk," "School Daze," or "Fuck the Cops" off their own 7"). A quick gloss at the lyric sheet will find the band themselves confirming this in the songs themselves. I don't mean this in a derogatory way at all-- they add to the particular charm the whole damn package has got. There's a touch of metal crunch in the guitars, but much more in a mid-80's Nardcore kind of way than you might think from my description. It's got a bit of an RKL feel. Perhaps, even better, if significantly more East Coast, a bit of "Wacky Hi-Jinx" era AOD!

Aside from that, Mike included a rough copy of an 8 song demo they'd been working on, which they might be re-recording for another 7". I'd encourage them to do so, 'cause the songs are pretty damn decent, especially the second to last track, "Second Chance," a mid-paced circle-pit scorcher which sees singer/ guitarist Carl sound like a young Jeff Perlin.

One thing that plagues a lot of bands that try to straddle the skate/ thrash sound is shoddy songwriting. Even Dirty Rotten- era DRI or Negative FX songs (not to compare this band to them; they don't sound like either of those at all) are pretty well crafted, and a lot of bands seem to overlook this fact. The same way the youth crew revival yielded an awful lot of second and third rate, forgettable Wide Awake (who, IMHO, are pretty forgettable to begin with) knock-offs, so the thrash revival (Crucial Section, Total Fury, and some amazing Japanese bands aside) often just sped the formula up a bit and created some faster, forgettable songs with some slightly less "posi" lyrics. Ratbyte elude this entirely as they've got some interesting stuff going on in their song-writing; not the least of whichare their guitar leads which definitely add some dynamics to their songs.

Hopefully some new stuff will pop up by them shortly. In the meantime, check them out; you might want to start with the Clusterfuck 7", which seems to be the most recent.

Ratbye website
Ratbye on myspace