We were very excited to see this spring when local label Barsuk Records signed Ra Ra Riot, and the band announced it’s first full length due out in the fall. Well that time is here, and the much anticipated album, The Rhumb Line, has been well worth our wait! The band quickly gained critical attention in 2006, when their speedy graduation from playing house parties and venues around Syracuse University campus landed them a stage at New York’s CMJ festival.
Ra Ra Riot’s impassioned chamber pop, full of the myth and mystery of the Northeast, caught the ears of the folks at Spin, who subsequently declared the band, “one of the best young bands we’ve heard in a long time…” And with that the band was off, taking on a serious tour schedule, traveling the States and UK, as well as opening for bands like the Editors, Art Brut, and The Cribs. Ra Ra Riot spent the late months of 2007 recording their debut album with Ryan Hadlock (The Gossip, Blonde Redhead, Islands). The Rhumb Line, named for a bar in the old seaport town of Gloucester MA, is imbued with the loss of founding member/songwriter/drummer John Ryan Pike, who meant missing in the early hours after a show in Providence RI, drowning off Wilbur’s Point in Fairhaven. The album is full of melancholy and beauty, and as elegy for a friend and redemption of loss, it plays wonderfully!
The six piece band consists of vocalist Wes Miles, bassist Mathieu Santos, guitarist Milo Bonacci, cellist Alexandra Lawn, and violinist Rebecca Zeller, and they create both mournful and soaring melodies of strings, with tight, pop-smart rhythm and guitars giving structure for Miles wide-eyed poetic reveries. One can’t help feeling Pike’s presence on songs like “Ghost Under Rocks”, where strings and bass churn out of the start, turning brackish water until the pizzicatto of violin gives way to soaring female vocals and Wes Miles celebrates, “Here you are/breathing life into ghosts/under rocks…”. Or on the elegant and lovely “Winter “05”, as delicate strings criss-cross and glide like falling snow on a landscape made stark by the lyrical realization, “If you were here/Winter wouldn’t pass quite so slow”.
The album also includes more poppy numbers like “St. Peter’s Day Festival”, where the bands relationship with Vampire Weekend comes out in the breezy and delightful arrangement of strings and “rock”, while Miles asks,”Don’t you think by now/There’s truth to all she said to us/C’mon! C’mon! C’mon!” And with that we know we are on different ground with Ra Ra Riot. Where Vampire Weekend’s deft Prep school wit and sarcasm might make them too cool for Nantucket, Rar Ra Riot warms with a bohemian and poetic charm fit for your next Lit. major love meltdown!
