The Rural Alberta Advantage - Mended with Gold

The Rural Alberta Advantage

Mended with Gold

30 September 2014

Paper Bag/Saddle Creek

 

3.5 stars out of 5

 

 

Toronto’s best tribute band to The Frames, The Rural Alberta Advantage have just dropped their third album, Mended with Gold. It’s everything you’d expect from a Canadian indie rock outfit: earnest, emotional songs with strong melodies and a sense of melancholy. After all, in HarperCanada™ we have a lot to be melancholy about: our government has sold our country to China and told the UN to go sit on a tack regarding abuses of our aboriginal peoples. But back to the record.

 

The RAA are all about giving you stadium rock anthems in the cozy environment of tiny hipster venues. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that—why shouldn’t the poorly dressed twenty-somethings of our nation’s gentrified inner cities be able to enjoy a good old cathartic experience be able to do so without feeling like they’re betraying their people? If you’re constantly charting high on !earshot then you likely have a reasonable quantity of indie cred, or you satisfy CanCon requirements, or both, so there’s no guilt there, right? Listening to “On the Rocks” is a perfectly legitimate pleasure, even if there’s really not much separating the RAA’s version of alt-rock from that of Our Lady Peace (which, let’s be frank together as a nation, was truly fucking awful).

 

So if you’re having a hipster hang-up regarding whether you can still listen to the RAA and publicly admit it, you can set your worries aside and just enjoy this record. It’s really not bad, for almost-mainstream-alternative-stadium-rock. And even if it goes on to sell two million copies (which it won’t), you can still listen to it because you were into them before they got big, right?

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger