The Rural Alberta Advantage, Hometowns
Featured Album
In an aeroplane over Alberta...
Nils Edenloff, the lead singer for the Rural Alberta Advantage, possesses a complete and utter inability to sing with any measure of distance or cynicism. With his nasal, earnest voice, Nils pleads, pledges, confesses, praises and laments. Give him a slice of history like the 1903 disaster in the Canadian mining town of Frank, Alberta that buried an entire town alive beneath a rockslide, bodies still dug from its ruins decades later, and what does he sing? "Under the rubble/ The mountain that tumbled/ I'll hold you forever/ I'll hold you forever," on "Frank, AB." There's an urgency to Nils and Amy Cole and Paul Banwatt, his bandmates. Absorb, experience, write an amazing song about it, repeat.
Hometowns, the RAA's spectacular, doe-eyed debut, isn't the stuff of teenage love, sappy love letters or rapid infatuation. The band sees love in its soup, for sure, but it's the very best kind: earnest and sincere, and honest in its limitations. Take the gorgeous "In the Summertime" and its heart-skipping refrain: "And once in a while/ I know our hearts beat out of time/ And once in a while/ I know they'll fall back in line," all of it delivered in a soft, stoned coo that summons aorta butterflies and eye grins.
One of the first things that will undoubtedly jump out after you download Hometowns is how Neutral Milk Hotel it is. And it's true. Jeff Mangum has obviously impacted this album; he and Nils have similar vocal tones ("non-singer singers" was how Nils described it in our interview) and a similar urgency. Mangum always sounds on the verge of death, each word potentially his last. The RAA doesn't go that far, but the spirit is there. Maybe every sixth word is a "Rosebud" rather than each and every one, but when you hear it, you know it.
The biggest difference between the RAA and NMH comes in the rhythm section. The Arcade Fire, by piling rhythms in endless layers, have helped steer indie into grandiosity — which was it's Achilles Heel in the '90s — and the RAA have taken those lessons to heart. For one, the lineup of the band is essentially Nils singing and playing guitar and Amy and Paul playing percussion. (Amy and Paul contribute more than that — Amy sings quite a bit, for instance — but that's their primary role.) This leads to songs like "Rush Apart" and "Four Night Rider" and "The Deathbridge in Lethbridge" being extremely percussive, explosive even.
In what is probably the least objective close I can imagine, Amy said something really striking to me in our phone interview last week, something that speaks eloquently to why we love this band, and why we chose them for eMusic Selects. Here's Amy: "I remember talking to Nils after we finally got the record and I listened to it all the way through the first time. And I remember talking to [Nils] and saying, 'You know my favorite part about the record is that I believe you. I believe in what you're saying. I totally buy it. '" Simply put, we buy it, too.
