Send "Born Ruffians " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Thephoenix |
 Over the past half of Warp’s robust 20-year run, the label’s enduring legacy as a vanguard force in electronic music has drifted as its tastes have gone positively eclectic. The mixed-media future folk of Bibio, the experimental soul of Jamie Lidell, the polished post-punk nuts of Maximo Park — these are the sounds that have elevated Warp from the Squarepusher pushing that first made its name. If there’s one commonality that continues to bind these varied acts into a family, it’s a prevailing clarity of vision. Bibio’s Ambivalence Avenue, Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House, Lidell’s Multiply — these were statement albums by artists prepared to make them.Now, Toronto trio Born Ruffians may have their turn with their sophomore effort. Fans of the high organization and tempered pop textures of Field Music will adore “Higher and Higher,” which twists its minimal quirks tightly around its spartan rhythm as Luke LaLonde’s strained vocal stretches like a sail connecting David Byrne, Tom Verlaine, and Hamilton Leithauser. “What To Say” enjoys the subdued soul of a Young Marble Giants track and the jangly simplicity of classic Unrest — but its fresh change of clothes could be on loan from Vampire Weekend (however that may strike you)....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| Scenes often imply a style, but for the most visible exports of Toronto's post-millennial indie-rock scene-- Broken Social Scene, the Constantines, the Hidden Cameras-- the unifying principle has been not so much a common musical aesthetic as a communal ethic: the compulsion to crowd the stage with players and audience members alike, turning observers into participants and vice versa. Arriving in Toronto three years ago from the nearby town of Midland, on paper Born Ruffians seemed antithetical to the prevailing group-hug atmosphere: they boast no auxiliary horn or string sections, no spotlight-stealing guest female singers, no balaclava-clad dancers-- just three unassuming kids in standard guitar/bass/drums formation. But Born Ruffians haven't let their personnel deficiencies and basic instrumentation stop them from thinking and functioning like a mass collective-- they simply hoot and holler and make a spectacle of themselves (a cappella group-huddle sing-alongs, anyone?) like a band three times their size. Born Ruffians' 2006 debut EP packed this restless vigor into six compact but complicated songs: wiry frontman Luke LaLonde shrieked about getting laid and getting paid, while bassist Mitch DeRosier and drummer Steve Hamelin seemed to be reacting not to the singer's melodic cues, but the convulsions in his puberty-freaked voice. So compared to this petulant precedent, the opening title track to the band's first full length, Red Yellow Blue, goes down like a horse tranquilizer: amid a rippling, hypnotic guitarpeggio, the sound of distant whistles and an eerily expansive sense of space, LaLonde's voice assumes a Panda Bear-like levity, as he sings of a fantasy to start his own country and choose the colors for its flag: "Such a myriad to choose from/ I pick red, yellow, and blue." Of course, he would go with primary colors-- for all their spastic outbursts and time-signature trickery, at the heart of every Born Ruffians song is a plea for simplicity....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Born Ruffians is on the up and up. The young Toronto band has mostly charmed critics with its two EPs to date, but guess what? Get past Luke Lalonde’s reedy voice and the yelping singalong tendencies in backing vocals and it’s clear the group is onto something: their debut album Red, Yellow and Blue is a consistent, and consistently unexpected, pleasure. The band burst onto the (online) scene with a bit of trickery: “This Sentence Will Ruin/Save Your Life”, two-and-a-half minutes of barely-contained joy, revving itself up with “hey-hey-hey” yelps. What wasn’t immediately obvious was that the spare guitar-bass-drums setup was a neat bit of bait-and-switch. “I need a girlfriend, I’m lonely” hit squarer due to the simple, cycling 1-2 chords. After that, we’d forgive again that staid reinterpretation of Grizzly Bear’s masterpiece “Knife” on the Hummingbird EP just out of goodwill. The confidence is repaid, not only because “Hummingbird is a cheeky appropriation of some common indie rock tropes, but that the appropriation’s so carefree and, yes, likeable. If you took Vampire Weekend’s melodic sensibility (the clean, simple melody and bass lines), threw in a serving of Animal Collective’s late-period experimental pop joy, and laid something like Alec Ounsworth’s pointed voice over the top, you might end up approaching something like Born Ruffians’ sound. What’s most apparent on their debut is the middle bit. It’s 40 minutes of joy, with few breaks. When Lalonde sings, on the opening “Red, Yellow and Blue”, that on the flag for his own country he’d include “Blue, because I’d still have sad days”, you never quite believe it....full text |
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