Sweat, Smoke And Broken Strings: The Born Ruffians At Lincoln Hall
By Kim Bellware in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 18, 2010 6:20PM
The Born Ruffians joked the last time they played Chicago, they had about one fan in attendance—lead singer Luke LaLonde’s dad. The audience-of-one quip might not have been one hundred percent true, but it wasn’t too far off the mark: the monstrously catchy songs and relentless energy on the group’s 2008 debut Red, Yellow & Blue couldn’t have grabbed less notice from buzz bloggers and mainstream media alike.
The young Canadian pop-rockers should feel plenty heartened after seeing that in two years’ time, their popularity had soared high enough to produce a wild throng of devoted fans for their energy blast of a performance Wednesday night at Lincoln Hall.
We’d call ourselves huge fans of the group’s first record, and without laying it on too thick, say that it outshines their spanking-new release, Say It, by several thousand megawatts. From the shape of the set list, The Born Ruffians must agree: they wisely featured only smattering of new material, instead digging out Red, Yellow & Blue gems like the convulsive, spurting “Barnacle Goose,” tremolo-heavy “Hedonistic Me” and the brilliant, jerking “In A Mirror.” Some vocals on several songs had a choral group effect that we figured would be impossible for the four band members to recreate onstage; instead, the audience knew every word (of the older songs), actually filling out the sound for an effect that was better than what we could have hoped for.
And though it’s not hard to excite a room of giddy 18-and-over listeners (a chug of beer by a musician onstage is usually enough to elicit deafening cheers), The Born Ruffians are absolute masters at pacing, both between and within songs. Drummer Steven Hamelin pounded out sustained “Wipe Out” riff for a few bars to work up the crowd before LaLonde exploded into the climbing, crashing “Hummingbird.” During their encore of “I Need a Life,” the group dialed the sound, intensity and lights down to nearly nothing before building back up into an extended version of the song, playing furiously enough that the smoke pouring onstage could have been coming out of the musicians rather than the machine.
As evidenced by any number of young bands, there’s not much talent required to just play loud, fast and hard (though Mitch Derosier riffed hard enough to earn him a broken bass string which LaLonde proceeded to whip him with onstage). The Born Ruffians have figured out how to stuff each musical role with personality to spare, play together impossibly spot-on and keep their fans close with their post-adolescent goofballing.
The band’s savvy in taking an otherwise vanilla number and kicking it up appropriately for a live show saved many of the new songs like “Sole Brother” and “Retard Canard” when they veered dangerously close to the territory normally inhabited by Vampire Weekend’s blander tracks. And while we don’t want to come down too hard on poor Say It, after Wednesday’s show, we think The Born Ruffians could be handed the musical equivalent of cold leftovers, and live, make it sound gourmet.