These Indie Kids in Mourning are Coming for to Dance
At first blush, Ra Ra Riot’s debut longplayer plays a little like the self-titled set from their pals and part-time collaborateurs Vampire Weekend, if you trade the fingerstyle soukous rhythms for chugging strings. Musically speaking, The Rhumb Line is poppy, preppy, jaunty, bouncy, and other cutesy adjectives that imply head-bobbin’, sunshinin’, slightly-twee, polo-shirt’d indie-pop fun.
But closer listening, and delving into the upstate-New-Yorker’s blackened back-story, reveals something far different. In June of 2007, the quintet’s original drummer, John Pike drowned in Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts, and his spirit lingers over much of this RRR LP. Playing songs whose music was often co-written by Pike, it’s not hard to read between frontman Wesley Miles’ lyrical lines.
The aptly-named opener, “Ghost Under Rocks,” finds a chorus where Miles wails “all your soaking wet dreams/you’ve spent them/you have gone and dreamt them/dry” with a keening edge; before later tossing off “we’re gripping seats and plots/pleading to honoured lots” as if the words, now, weren’t loaded with layered meaning.
The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
Of course, looking through these kind of critical eyes, it’s easy to see, to hear, Pike’s spirit everywhere on The Rhumb Line; to read meaning into Miles-crooned lines like “death, o baby” and “the river and the rock that fell there/it all falls apart” and “imagining a place where homes are built on frames/and where they plant new bulbs along our graves.”
To do so is to make Pike into a mythical martyr, a romantic figure propelling Ra Ra Riot’s jaunty indie-pop through territories strangely shadowy. Not to mention that, to make this all about one fallen figure is to deny that all this lyrical dealing in death has an obvious librarian ambition. The Rhumb Line is riddled with references to Virginia Woolf, To Kill A Mockingbird, e.e. cummings (whose poem "dying is fine)but Death" RRR openly rewrite), and, finally, to that great musical poetess of the literary reference, Kate Bush.
I Don't Know Why I'm Crying
Having already heard Ra Ra Riot belt out (on live-to-air bootleg) a positively barn-burnin’ version of Bush’s ornate “Hounds of Love,” their on-the-album cover of “Suspended in Gaffa” outs them as Bushophiles; the idiosyncratic songsmith’s wedding of classicism/ambition with pop-music joyousness obviously appealing to this outfit’s self-sensed sensibility.
So often blasted by strings and draped in the lyrical pall of literary mortality, it’s not surprising that Ra Ra Riot have copped comparisons to those funereal Canadian neo-stadium-rockers, the Arcade Fire. And whilst, once made, it’s difficult to sever such a connection, musically, the line between them doesn’t seem so unbroken. Where those almighty Montréalers favour a kind of ecstatic bombast, Ra Ra Riot go out of their way to avoid building dense musical walls. Across The Rhumb Line, there’s an undistorted, playful, nimble-fingered quality that unites every single song; Ra Ra Riot sounding forever light, even when the lyrics get dark.
Record Label: Barsuk
Release Date: 19 August 2008
