Album Review

You have to listen real hard to hear the music on The Rhumb Line, the debut album from Ra Ra Riot, hailing from Syracuse, NY and arriving on the scene with buzz aplenty. That’s because the story behind the band’s first two years of existence, dominated by a tragedy, is so loud.

On June 1, 2007, John Pike, Ra Ra Riot’s drummer and one of its songwriters and lyricists, went missing after a show in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, Pike’s home state. His dead body was eventually recovered from the bay.

Thus it is tempting to hear The Rhumb Line as an elegy for Pike, especially since he helped write several songs on the album before his untimely death. And the sense of loss is only exacerbated by the sometimes gloomy subject matter. Mentions of death and dying can be found often in the lyrics. The album opener, “Ghosts Under Rocks” seems to reference a cemetery visit, while the first single, “Dying Is Fine,” takes it’s title and chorus from the poetry of E.E. Cummings.

But The Rhumb Line is not a concept album about death, nor are Ra Ra Riot one-note wonders. The band’s music is an interesting amalgam of the world-pop appropriated earlier this year by Vampire Weekend and the catharsis-rock of Arcade Fire. You can credit the subtle, inventive contributions of guitarist Milo Bonacci and bassist Mathieu Santos for the former. But the band’s sound is driven first and foremost by strings, namely the cello of Alexandra Lawn and the violin of Rebecca Zeller, which bring a depth and pathos to the proceedings not often found in the indie-rock world.

Those strings can be used for tenderness, as on “Winter ’05,” a snapshot of loneliness. But they can also be used to transcend the dire lyrics and find uplift. Even on “Dying Is Fine,” Lawn and Zeller employ a staccato technique in the chorus that drives the song into frenzied crescendos where no sadness could possibly sustain.

Wes Miles does the singing, and his vocals play it straight with lyrics that sometimes betray the group’s status as a band of undergrads. Using words like “maundering” or transposing adjective and noun (“your sister fair”) could seem pretentious, but Miles wisely refuses to linger too long on them before making his next clear-eyed observation. (Sometimes he does cross the line though, as on this couplet from the otherwise fine “Oh, La”: “Come quickly now the air hangs heavily today/Oh no, but what is that crimson in the shade?” Yikes.)

If anything, the lyrics seem to find an acceptance of the inevitability of loss even while the music refuses to relent. When Miles sings on “Dying Is Fine,” “One can only love/Life until it’s ending,” he does so with a sad wisdom that only one who’s lost someone close to them can achieve.

The fact that Ra Ra Riot covers Kate Bush (“Suspended In Gaffa”) on their debut and not some punk band shows they know their strengths. And the way they manage to build drama within each and every song is a quality that should endure on future efforts no matter the subject matter.

It’s definitely OK to sympathize with the members of Ra Ra Riot. But, based on The Rhumb Line, don’t sell them short.