Ra Ra Riot

Few bands know the true meaning of adversity. They’ll claim they have overcome adversity to lend credibility – a badge of honour if you will – to their otherwise shallow name, but not many can say they’ve truly overcome great challenges.

Ra Ra Riot is not one of those bands.

The members of Ra Ra Riot all met while attending New York’s Syracuse University and decided to form a band in January 2006. “I really wanted to do something before I left school,” guitarist Milo Bonacci tells me when I recently spoke to him over the phone, “And it just turned out to be something that carried on.” The band, who consisted of Alexandra Lawn, Wesley Miles, John Pike, Mathieu Santos, Rebecca Zeller, and Bonacci, started playing shows around the campus before “graduating” to larger gigs including playing NYC’s CMJ Music Marathon. But a year later, tragedy struck, when the body of drummer Pike was found on the shores of Buzzard Bay, near Providence, Rhode Island on June 2nd. He had gone missing from a party the night before and was believed to have drowned.

That could have been the end of the Ra Ra Riot story. But instead, the band decided to persevere. In January 2007, the band signed to major label V2 Records, a label partly responsible for launching the likes of The White Stripes’ and Moby, among others. Ra Ra Riot then released their first single, “Dying Is Fine”, a song that quickly made people sit up and notice them. The title and lyrics of the song, are a literary reference to the poem “dying is fine, but death”, by American poet e.e. cummings. “My roommate at university was an English student,” says Bonacci, “It was one of the first songs that we all wrote together.” The song, a sweeping, baroque pop-rock tune, is a meditation on the cathartic nature of death while paying tribute to not only a former bandmate, but a dear friend.

After “Dying Is Fine” came out, things began to move at an accelerated pace for the band. The band’s released their debut album, The Rhumb Line (which was named after the seafaring term for the imaginary lines on the earth’s surface that cut the meridians at the same angle), in 2008 on Barsuk Records with new drummer Gabriel Duquette. The album’s nine tracks married crunchy pop and rock hooks with organs and strings, on-top of sharp song-writing, with many of the lyrics originally conceived by Pike. “Alexandra and Rebecca studied classical music. The rest of us have less formal training. I took guitar lessons – nothing structured though,” says Bonacci. The result managed to sound incredibly somber, full of reflections on death and dying, while at the same time sounding like a band who had suffered greatly and was now looking to a brighter future.

Then the accolades poured in. The Rhumb Line was voted as the 38th best album of the year by Rolling Stone, and reviewer Kyle Anderson said that “Ra Ra Riot combine Arcade Fire’s orchestral reveries with Vampire Weekend’s pop sensibility for an album that’s both effervescent and heartbreaking.” The band that had started out opening up for bands including Editors, Tokyo Police Club and Art Brut, was now stepping into a spotlight of their own, and played everywhere from Iceland to Illinois. Their popularity was also bolstered by a number remixes done by the well-known international outfit, the Remix Artist Collective. In fact, the main man behind the remixes, happened to be a good friend of the band. “Andrew [Maury] is our touring sound engineer,” Bonacci tells me. “The RAC did a remix of  “Manner To Act” and somehow Andrew got involved with them.”

As of lately, the members of Ra Ra Riot have been involved in other projects, both musically and non-musically. Lead singer Miles formed Discovery, an electronic and indie rock project, with Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij. The entire band has also gotten involved with the Yellow Bird Project, and designed a shirt, with proceeds going to the John Ryan Pike Memorial Fund. “We were asked and thought it was a good idea,” says Bonacci. The funds raised by their charity will go towards providing public access to musical instruments, and helping to faciliate a creative and collaborative learning environment for musicians.

But what about Ra Ra Riot fans craving new music from the band? Well, Bonacci has some good news for them. The guitarist tells me that the band’s recently completed tour will be the last tour the band will be doing with The Rhumb Line. Ra Ra Riot will then go back into the studio this winter to record their sophomore album. Bonacci tells me that it won’t be easy, but he is looking forward to it. And why not? After all, the band has already proven that they can overcome any challenge thrown in their paths and make beautiful music.

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