The advent of the Moog synthesizer in 1971 heralded an age of synthesized instrumental music. Yet the concept of playing instrumental rock on traditional instruments is still the focus of many post rock and experimental rock groups. Ratatat may be a sort of fusion of those styles; it consists of a guitarist, a bassist and a keyboardist. Although the band is widely considered an electronic act, the actual ratio of electronic to "organic" instrumentation may surprise the casual listener.The Crown Heights, Brooklyn band performed-along with Tufts student band Ezra Furman and the Harpoons and the rapper Despot-at Tufts' Oxfam Café to a packed house Wednesday. The venue (more of a multipurpose room at the back of one of Tufts' residence halls, converted into a nonprofit vegetarian restaurant and coffeehouse) was ill-suited to the performances; the long, narrow room provided almost no visibility for most concert-goers. I saw none of the performers during the show. All three bands, however, kept the audience interested with their performances, which drew from three rather different genres.

Ratatat's highly melodic instrumental songs easily outdid the two highly vocal performances that introduced them: Ezra Furman and the Harpoons were, to put it bluntly, obvious Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! acolytes and little more (Furman's voice could easily pass for that of CYHSY's Alec Ounsworth) And Despot performed a set of original songs, including what he referred to as his "international No. 1 hit," "Crap Artists" (chorus: "I get paid to breathe / Hooray for me / Hooray for me / Hooray for me").

Enveloped by luminous effects projected on the rear wall of the café, Ratatat played material spanning its two albums. The band's music, which can all sound the same to the untrained ear, generally consists of an instrumental melody with little rhythmic counterpoint, resulting in a steady, deliberate sound that makes dancing irresistible. That was the case Wednesday when Ratatat's strong, uncomplicated rhythms reverberated through the receptive crowd as one song shifted to the next. The band's most popular song, the single "Seventeen Years" (which is featured in a Hummer commercial) was greeted by cheers from a large portion of the audience. That song, like many of Ratatat's, sounded a little like videogame music played with guitar and bass; in particular, "Seventeen Years" reminded me of "Korobeiniki," the Russian folk song better known as the Tetris theme. Another of Ratatat's standouts was "Wildcat," a very unironically titled song from the 2006 album Classics, memorable for its sample of a wildcat's snarl.

The most remarkable aspect of the band's performance (besides coercing almost the entire audience to dance) was its technical precision; Ratatat's live performances sound almost exactly like its albums. The interest in seeing the band live lies in the experience of hearing the guitar and bass in a more organic setting: You can hear the strings bend and witness a more human performance than the synthesized feel of the albums. Also interesting is how much of Ratatat's music is performed with synthesized samples and how much with the more-familiar guitar and bass. Having listened to little of Ratatat's music before going to the show, I enjoyed the performance immensely. The march-like, anthemic songs tend to wash over the listener without reaching the epic proportions in which most post-rock bands revel.