Rah Rah Regina!
So I just got a new computer. I’m typing this on a brand new MacBook Pro. So pretty. So shiny. So precious.
But I faced a serious challenge when it came to transferring my music library. It was a headache and a half and the only relief came when I realized that the first music I put on this bad boy was Rah Rah’s Going Steady.
It was the perfect way to bust this machine’s MP3 cherry. This album has been around for awhile, but it’s a feat that it still feels as fresh as the day I first downloaded it.
Rah Rah is another one of those huge collectives born in the wake of Arcade Fire’s success. Their sound is big and lush, but folkier than Arcade Fire. The songs are poppier, the lyrics sing-a-longier and if they are sometimes depressing, they are humorously so.
At Hillside Festival this year, another Regina collective topped many a “best performance” list. And Library Voices had a brilliant set. I walked into that performance a fan and walked out a bigger, drunker fan. Any band that can write a song dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut with the lyrics “There’s an asterisk beside your name” is all right by me.
I feel sorry for anybody who had to listen to me that weekend, but after seeing Library Voices perform, I was overcome with a profound and lengthy bout of homesickness. Which I expressed by morphing into Slater from Dazed and Confused and extolling the musical virtues of my home prairie province, saying loudly, to anyone who would listen “Maaaaaan, Saskatchewan bands, man! The prairies are where it’s at!” And “I miss the State. We were hardcore back in the day. You know a club is good when there are no doors on the stalls in the bathroom!”
And finally: “If you think Library Voices are good (and if you don’t, you’re stupid), you should hear Rah Rah! They’re even better!”
It’s nice for a change, to see bands from the prairies get their due. I had a big schwak of complaints written out, whining about Regina’s concert scene and the mandate to bring huge, awful acts through the city since the Stones brought their walkers and canes to town and put on the biggest outdoor concert in Canadian history a few years ago. But the I realized that I can’t very well talk about what I don’t know. And I don’t know Regina anymore, but Rah Rah does. And they hearken back to a time when the city was undiscovered on The Innocent One.
What I do know is that the city is breeding a new guard of bands that are gaining some deserved attention. Rah Rah was best band in Regina by the Prairie Dog in 2007, and it is a goddamn shame that they weren’t included on the Polaris list because Going Steady is an album deserving of your attention.
“Duet for Emmylou and the Grievous Angel” is the gem of the album. It plaintively laments living the single life in a small town the way you and your single friends do, but with a bittersweet The chorus wails “It is fashionable, to be single/ in big cities but not in small towns/ in Regina, Saskatchewan/ I fell in love with her frown.” That is the charm of Saskatchewan (and this group) in a nutshell. It’s easy to fall in love with a smile of a city like Vancouver. But falling in love with Regina’s frown is another thing. I also dig the fantastical love story that is “Tentacles” (he loves her and if not for the language barrier, he might marry her, though she has tentacles.) There’s the sweetly simple back and forth of “Cuba/Peru” that highlights the way this group has mastered silly love songs.
In fact, they’ve moved on to hate songs.
Both “F**CK NAFTA” and “The Innocent One” have deceptively soft intros. Both are driving, frustrated anthems for a generation growing up in the wake of corruption, scandal and two huge, unwinnable wars. Going Steady is a near-perfect album filled with soaringly happy songs and bittersweet memories of a fading city. It is made better by its fortuitous release during an era characterized by its unending appetite for destruction of icons held dear by the generation before them. It don’t get much better than the command “Fuck all you stockbrokers in the crowd.”
It gives me heart that this is a band that has not yet had its dreams crushed by a harsh world and is still writing songs about damning the man and saving the empire.
Buy Going Steady from Sonic Unyon, Zunior, and iTunes and more importantly, go see them when they come to a town near you on their It’s Never Too Old To Believe a Dream Tour.
Rah Rah - Tentacles [3:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Rah Rah - Duet For Emmylou and Grievous Angel: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
