Rats on Rafts: Deep Below
Vinyl | CD | DL available here
Out 7th February, 2025
Rats on Rafts create an icy masterpiece: their most consistent and evocative record to date.
Rats on Rafts are the ultimate mood. When creating their splendid music, they act like a vortex that sucks in, reassembles, and then jettisons ideas, images, energies, sounds, sometimes people: all in the name of chasing something just out of reach. Maybe it’s the “new golden dream” that singer David Fagan mentions in their great single Japanese Medicine. This reviewer will take an educated guess and say he is still searching for it.
Regardless of the nature of the quest, what we listeners get with each step along the way is a solid statement of intent. Rats on Rafts always create a full package: not something that can easily be picked apart. As such, a study of their promo shots and especially covers is always instructive. This time the great Dutch graphic artist Viktor Hachmang has created an offset image that is an important key to decoding their fourth solo long player, Deep Below.
Previous album art from the band – busy collages of crepuscular cityscapes – seemed to speak of ambition, action, restlessness. Now, we get a monochrome image; a snail and its trail, and, in the background, the silhouettes and reflections of rose stems. Nothing else. The mood is reflective, suggesting struggle, reflection, and the slowness of life. It’s a beautiful image but it imparts a feeling that it is not particularly bothered by your reaction. Just like the music, I would bet.
Seen like this, the opening track Afterworld is less of a song than a proclamation of intent. Singer David Fagan holds out a hand of and a warning to us, with his talk of loyalty and holding his position. These gnomic, broken texts set the scene for the stories we will hear throughout this long player.
The sonic backdrop is equally simple: frosty synths lay down a sound that never thaws, the bass rumbles and echoes, the drums patter out a quick, stern-faced tattoo, and a clear sprinkle of guitar picks out a path through a white landscape. From now on every track – outside of the sprightly oddball, Nature Breaks – is just another light reflected from the same crystalline prism.
But what makes this album utterly wonderful is that each song has its own unique character. Second track Japanese Medicine is one of their greatest ever numbers; a tale that seems to examine a lost friendship and all the regret and frustrations that reflecting on the past brings. The slightly metallic synth sound, dragged uncomplainingly out of 1980, is the base for the other instruments: the bass flows like water running under a frozen surface, the drumming taps out an order, and the guitars pick out a series of mournful arpeggios that constitute the melody. The rest is down to the listener to reshape the song to fit their own emotional needs; a chance to remember their own fuck ups and heartbreaks. It is such a brilliant, standout track in a world of over-suggestive, over-cooked and sometimes over-pressing emotions and poses.
Song lyrics – however obscure – are often the only things we can hold on to in this set of foggy, Tarkovskian landscapes, where figures appear out of the gloaming, say their piece, and return to their allotted underworld. Listen to All These Things, where the lines “I know better now / So much better now” take hold. The sing-song single, Hibernation, with its chiming guitar chords, synth washes echoing bass, talks of a (physical? emotional?) space where “a winter breeze blows through”. Listen carefully for the dripping noises made by the guitars which nail the song’s sense of time frozen, like icicles. Time gets another showcase with Voiceprint: a stately cut with another absurdly simple synth part (think John Foxx) that weaves a hypnotic spell. Fagan sings of “being here for so long”, and asks us over and over to “listen carefully”. Title track Deep Below is a submerged mesh of sounds that eventually offer up the line “It could have been such a great story”. All these lines nag at you long after the music fades into the afterglow.
Something else that strikes: despite writing some thumping songs over the years, Rats on Rafts are not, in my opinion, a “songs” band: their greatest tunes sometimes feel as if they have emerged from a studio jam; maybe until now. This record has a clutch of superb songs: Japanese Medicine, Voiceprint, Hibernation and The Day Before. All are artfully conceived and put under the microscope in the studio for any traces of excess or irrelevance. The Day Before is a truly wonderful lullaby, something that could easily have sat on the last Cure LP – the synths enfold the listener like a thick scarf wrapped tight against a swirling bank of fog and the guitar chimes like Robin Guthrie’s on Victorialand. Last track Sleepwalking is a gloriously single-minded plod, blessed with a lovely refrain and a guitar line that acts as an emotional prop for the listener. The thick, glutinous synths almost smother the song, squeezing out the feels and allowing us to shed an icy tear or two. The sound of teenage melancholy in excelsis.
Rats on Rafts are not a hobby band. Work is serious stuff. Like other uncompromising artists, such as B.S. Johnson, Adrian Borland, or nom du jour Lawrence of Felt, the work done has to be done right, in line with whatever vision that guides and in the manner intended. Even if it is at a personal or spiritual cost. Suffering is desire, don’t forget.
UK/Ireland tour dates. All tickets here.
12 Feb, The Engine Room, North Shields, UK + TV Death
13 Feb, Voodoo Rooms, Speakeasy, Edinburgh, UK + Puppy Teeth
14 Feb, The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow, UK + Normal Service
16 Feb, Bello bar, Dublin, IRL + Oh Boland
18 Feb, The Peer Hat, Manchester, UK + Camo Wizard + Illegal Fireworks
19 Feb, Voodoo Daddys Showroom, Norwich, UK + Artur Black
20 Feb, The Tin Music and Arts, Coventry, UK + THE DSM IV
21 Feb, The Prince Albert, Brighton, UK + ChopChop
22 Feb, Two Palms, London, UK + Richard James Foster
23 Feb, Ramsgate Music Hall, Ramsgate, UK + debdepan
More about Rats on Rafts can be found here. Rats on Rafts’ site is here.
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All words by Richard Foster. More writing by Richard can be found at his author’s archive.
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