From darkness to light

Folk-rock trio The Rural Alberta Advantage tinkered with their usual formula on their latest album ‘The Rise’

The Rural Alberta Advantage needs to be the Rural Alberta Advantage as a whole to truly get the peculiar alchemy that’s sustained it as a band for close to two decades flowing, but the close-knit trio did eventually find some advantage in isolation during that recent two-year period when everyone was … y’know … forced into isolation.

The RAA is a live band’s live band and, when it comes to creating new music, the charged folk-rock threesome relies on the same thunderous, catalytic energy it brings to the stage. The jam space is where the songs erupt spontaneously, the stage is where they get battered into shape or kicked to the curb and without those options available, frankly, the Rural Alberta Advantage was a bit little lost during those many dark months of lockdown in Toronto.

“I think, if anything, it just made us realize we don’t do anything in a vacuum,” said Edmonton-born frontman/guitarist Nils Edenloff over pints and fried food with drummer Paul Banwatt and keyboardist/vocalist Amy Cole — who rejoined the band four years ago after a brief sabbatical — in a deserted pub near their Port Lands rehearsal space one recent, chilly evening. “The pandemic made us realize that, as much as we try to do stuff on our own, the three of us need to be in a room together and have a chance to write. Even going back to 2018 when Amy came back to play, I’d never realized how much just the three of us being together in a room or onstage makes something special happen. It was exciting. And then the pandemic happened.

“We were keeping in touch over Zoom and demoing stuff at home and we did go through a moment of ‘Let’s figure out how to jam online’ and it was ridiculous. It was just a lot of ridiculous noise.”

“There’s this weird world of online jam sessions that we discovered in the process of trying to figure out

how to jam,” laughed Banwatt. “People set up a server and then other people can just, like, join and jam over the Internet. It’s so strange. There’s a built-in lag and delay, obviously, so it’s not going to work very well. And it was a total failure for us.”

Desperate not to lose the forward momentum toward a potential new album it had gained during the few months when it was able to play shows between shutdowns, the RAA also “tried and failed” at trading music files over the Internet in the long struggle that would finally yield the bristling six-song EP “The Rise” — a decidedly more capacious, meticulously arranged and thoughtfully dynamic outing than any of the band’s past four albums, even 2017’s celebrated “The Wild” – this past March.

The three friends eventually managed to find a cavernous rehearsal space at the back of the Junction’s Indie Alehouse where they could pop open the back doors and jam at a safe distance without contravening any COVID restrictions (and with access to “a walk-in fridge full of all the beer we could drink” to boot, noted Banwatt) and, surely enough, the magic started to happen again right away. And yet? When they returned to their respective abodes, each of the RAA’ers felt compelled to mess with the rough demos on their own in a way they hadn’t before, albeit largely because they had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

“Even if we were at far different corners trying to figure it out, at least we were in a room together. That was realizing we needed to be in a room — even if we, were, like across a football field from each other,” said Banwatt. “But it was also the first time ever where we had demos that sounded like the songs we actually recorded.”

“We definitely had a chance to work on stuff at home once we’d got the arrangements and the ideas down and tinker with them to a point where we were, like, ‘OK, we like this,’” said Edenloff. “So I don’t think we’ve ever had a more clear idea of what we wanted to do going in than, probably, we’ve had since the first record when we’d played those songs so many times that it was just a matter of ‘Well, why can’t we make this like a show?’”

“This was kind of like the opposite because this time we’d had no opportunity to play these songs in front of people at all before recording, right?” concurred Cole.

“I do think the pandemic kind of forced our hand in terms of evolving because we couldn’t do what we always did before. So it was, like: ‘OK, we need to make new music. We want to make new music but we can’t do it like we did because we’re not allowed to leave the house so how do we figure it out?’ And so it was all these trial-and-error things. And eventually we came up with a process that’s new for us, but I think it’s pushed us all to a new place, for sure.”

“The Rise”, which by times lands in a curious orbit that recalls the Tragically Hip, weirder Spirit of the West and Neutral Milk Hotel all at once, was the result. And there’s more to come. The RAA has already laid down another galvanizing new cut entitled “Plague Dogs” due for release early next year that messes with the formula even more. One more is in the works.

If tried-and-true Rural Alberta Advantage tradition holds, the hot new cuts will get a thorough roadtesting during the days ahead. There’s a hometown gig with Paper Bag Records labelmate Zoon at the Danforth Music Hall tonight, followed by excursions to Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal, Oshawa and Hamilton and then a long run at the States – where the RAA is signed to Bright Eyes main man Conor Oberst’s Saddle Creek imprint – commencing in February. Europe beckons after that.

Like most bands who’ve spent a couple of years in dry dock, then, the RAA is delighted to find people on several continents still willing to follow it wherever the great adventure might next lead. Even if its quite sustainable level of international notoriety still operates at the “obscure to most” level.

“It’s great that people know us but, invariably, nine times out of 10 when someone says ‘Oh, you’re in a band?’ it’s still, like, ‘OK, we’re gonna do this: I’m gonna tell you the name and you’re not gonna know it and then you’re gonna stumble on it and it’s gonna be weird,’” said Edenloff.

“Or it’s, like: ‘Are you on the radio?’ ‘Yeah, sometimes we’re on the radio.’ And then I tell them what band and they go ‘Never heard of you.’ But we’re at a great level where we can still play shows and people still feel passionately about our stuff and we can sell out, like, the Danforth and Hamilton and Oshawa and all that stuff.”

“It’s like being a well-known geologist,” offered Banwatt.

“Yeah, for people who are into that, it’s a big deal,” laughed Edenloff. “But if they’re not into it? You’re a nobody.”

L E ROY S CHULZ