Searching For That South Dakota Sound

Working Title: The Rural Alberta Advantage Mean Every Single Word in their Name.

My initial hesitation was the name. The Rural Alberta Advantage sounded like an unfortunately named credit union. Second, I presumed the band’s name was intended as irony. These guys couldn’t possibly have meant that name literally.

But, my rural protectionism died fast. It turns out Toronto’s The Rural Alberta Advantage not only writes unnerving, cinematic ballads about those spacious, wild Caribou-infested hinterlands, but they actually mean it.

On “Ballad of the RAA” Paul Banwatt, a 31-year-old computer engineer by day, sings like a coonskin-cap-version of Thom Yorke about his desolate journey from a smalltown near the Oil Sands of Alberta to Toronto: “We invariably left the prairies in my heart.” Then the band picks up; the drumming underneath is hectic but always in control, like a runaway mine-cart, and the spastic jitterbug guitar-strumming helps this record about cold places burn like an electrical fire.

My family took a vacation to an Alberta dinosaur museum in the 4th grade. Other than remembering that McDonald’s sold pizza, not much stood out, just miles and miles of flat, sparse prairie—in many ways, like parts of South Dakota. Writing music for an indie band about this landscape has always been a tempting offer; the rural folks need balladeers who grew up on Wes Anderson, too. But, the closest I’ve heard (at least in a few years) is Bon Iver, whose haunting harmonics are more befit that backwoods of Wisconsin than the Dakotas.

Although Spill Canvas is the most successful (at least in terms of record sales) of any South Dakota-born act in the past decade, the guys coming closest to developing what could, be called a “South Dakota sound” are most assuredly We All Have Hooks For Hands and Burlap Wolf King. There are plenty of South Dakota bands I’d take in a cage-match against acts from any corner of the globe, but Hooks and the Wolf King stand out as having crafted a sound that you would reach to first if you were creating an iMovie for space aliens who had never seen South Dakota. Play those records, most notably “The Pretender” and “The Middle,” and the landscape—its bohemian quirkiness and lonely beauty—seems to just appear before your eyes.

This is the success of The Rural Alberta Advantage. God knows if my memory of Alberta is anything like what the music of the RAA implies. But, they make it sound like a place you wouldn’t mind growing up.

Here’s to representing those places where livestock outnumber people.

Thanks to Cousin Christopher for writing this post.

Comments

[john]

nils = singer
paul = drummer