December 11th, 2008 * 9 30 Listening Room * Louisville, KY
MP3:
The crowd was smaller than anticipated but excited nonetheless when the six Syracuse, New York indie rock kids known collectively as Ra Ra Riot finally took the stage of the 9:30 Listening Room Thursday night just before 10 PM for their first ever show in Louisville. Lead singer Wesley Miles stepped to the mic and surveyed the crowd.
“Is this really going to be the first show we’ve ever played where everyone is sitting down?” he queried with a smile on his face, as his rhetorical question turned into a command. “COME UP HERE!”
The room moved to encapsulate the stage of the small theatre and Wesley and band started into “Each Year,” the second track from their highly-praised debut full-length, The Rhumb Line.
There is something special about Ra Ra Riot onstage. First, they each seem to be having an incredible time with their instruments and with each other. Each obviously love the songs, all mouthing along most of the words throughout the night. And finally, they are able to recreate the orchestral sound of their recorded material eerily perfectly.
While contemporaries rely on loops and synths to make string sounds on stage, 1/3 of Ra Ra Riot make the execution of this their only job. Cellist Alexandra Lawn and violinist Rebecca Zeller anchor the left and right sides of the stage as they rock and sway in time, contributing what is essentially the backbone of the Ra Ra Riot sound. While these stringed instruments aren’t all that uncommon in rock music, they are usually used for accents and flourishes. Ra Ra Riot builds the songs around these sounds instead of assigning them to be part of the backdrop, and what results is both unique and inspiring.
The band launched into “A Manner to Act” second – the only song from the evening not on Rhumb Line and arguably the most “rock” song of the set. Wesley then took time to ask the crowd to sing along loudly since he was fighting off bronchitis – but this mention of the illness was the only indication that anything was wrong with the gentle frontman. He spent the entire evening nailing note after note, occasionally bobbing up and down with the beat, and goofing around with guitarist Milo Bonacci and bass player Mathieu Santos.
The sextet touched everything from their debut full-length, finishing the set with arguably the three strongest pieces in their arsenal. This is where the band seemed uniformly the most confident and comfortable, building the crowd into a frenzy with the intensity of “Ghost Under Rocks,” transitioning quickly into the pop gem “Too Too Too Fast,” and wrapping things up with the anthem-ic “Dying is Fine.”
Calm, courteous, and seeming a bit shy (but in an endearing way), the group filed off the stage while waving. Wesley thanked and resolutely promised the crowd: “We’ll be back.”
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