Ra Ra Riot, The Rhumb Line
Featured Album
On Ra Ra Riot's incredible debut, every song wears a tuxedo.
Long after we've been through sluggish winters and big empty beds and weekend trips to Gloucester, New York quintet Ra Ra Riot state, without pretense or opacity, what it is they are all about. It's simple and direct, and repetition makes it stick: "We've got a lot to learn from each other, we have got to stick together."
This is no idle sentiment. Over the course of a fistful of months, Ra Ra Riot went from the center of a whirlwind of hype to the backend of a harrowing tailspin, buffeted by bum label deals, bailing band members and, tragically, the death of drummer and songwriter John Ryan Pike in 2007. If there was any group of people uniquely suited to weigh in on the question of staying together versus falling apart, it's this one.
Tellingly, there's not an elegy in sight on The Rhumb Line — it's all triumph and celebration and unity, turning floodlights on the dark shadows and blowing rude raspberries at the Reaper. There's a brightness that radiates from the record, each song giving off a soft, serene glow.
Maybe it's the strings. Ra Ra Riot uses cello and violin the way other bands use electric guitar: as backbone, carrying the melody instead of complementing it. The instruments make everything sound stately: "St. Peter's Day Festival" would be a simple speedy pop number, but it ascends the second the strings swoop in, gaining poise and stature. It's as if every song were wearing a tuxedo: "Winter '05" is a miniature waltz, just a simple backbeat, the gallant cello and violin and Wes Miles's plummy, pleading voice. Even the faster ones — and the album is full of faster ones — seem refined. "Each Year" skips giddily forward, guitars twitching, drums tumbling forward, but violin tucked neatly front and center like a pocket square. And they turn Kate Bush's "Suspended in Gaffa" inside out, letting the strings sub for Bush's strange vocalizing and straightening out the cockeyed melody line.
The bulk of the record was written before Pike's passing — many of the songs were written by Pike himself — so any reflection on the tragedy is incidental. It's hard to listen to the ee cummings-cribbing "Dying Is Fine," though, and not notice the prescience. It's a rollicking, breathless number, built around a simple refrain: "You know that dying is fine, but maybe/ I wouldn't like death if death were good." Like most Ra Ra Riot songs, it starts slowly, a few guitar palpitations, a dapper cello, a moody vocal. But it gets to the chorus and it's off, and the glorious melody undercuts the song's somber message. This, of course, is Ra Ra Riot's greatest feat: in their hands, even mourning sounds like celebration.
