Rah Rah is a sextet from Saskatchewan and The Poet’s Dead is their third album.
There. Now that we got the basic info out of the way, I feel like I can now fully convince you as to why you should listen to this band.
The thing is you shouldn’t need convincing because Rah Rah is a band that anyone can relate to. They sing about drinking too much, missing home and losing the ones you love. If you can’t relate to that you’re probably a robot who didn’t cry during Up. The wife DIES in the first five minutes of a DISNEY movie! Who does that?! Oh, yeah, spoiler alert.
Anyway, when I first met the band, they were on the tail end of a pretty big tour and by all means should have been exhausted and beating each other up. Singer Erin Passmore was also just getting over a terrible cold, but there was this crazy energy bouncing off the walls in the room. They were happy to be doing what we’ve all dreamed of doing. I’m not talking about jumping in a van, playing music in various towns across North America and having a steady diet of gas station food (although I do have a penchant for taquitos); I’m talking about doing something that you love.
Rah Rah loves playing music. If you’ve ever seen them live then you know exactly what I’m talking about. They swap around instruments and communicate musically with each other in a way that rivals a band like Broken Social Scene and the crowd reacts to it and pushes them even further. This is the reason they’re known as “the Broken Social Scene of the prairies.” Ok, I’m the only one that calls them that, but it should be a thing.
When you first listen to “Prairie Girl,” you’ll be reaching for that repeat button while dancing in your kitchen... I say that from experience. Everyone knows the best at-home-dancing happens in the kitchen. Not only does the song have a catchy beat, but the lyrics are genius as well. Erin Passmore sings about how she’s used to spending her winters alone, living in the prairies. So when she decides to ditch this drunken farm boy at a party in the city, she’s going to be alright because “there’s no place I’d rather be/than this lonesome prairie.”
There’s a lot of great tunes on this album that may be youthful, but their mature sound is what carves their own niche.
On “Little Poems” we hear Marshall Burns drunkenly lamenting true love: “she loves her fun and getting stoned.”
On their Facebook page they posed the question, “What would Neil Young do?” and it’s apparent that they love the legend with some nods on “Art and A Wife.” Marshall sings about playing along to Crazy Horse, and trying to make out with girls. Which every warm blooded Canadian male has done.
The Poet’s Dead has a song for everybody on it. If you disagree, resist the urge to be that robot. Do yourself a favour and listen to Rah Rah when they show up to play Nelson, April 16 and you’ll know what I’m talking about.