Album Reviews

Remember when music was fun? Like when you were in high school trying to get a band together so you could rock-out while pretending to be your favorite group, and maybe get a date or two out of it? For many of us that was long ago, but for Born Ruffians it was last week, and their debut EP is brimming with a cheeky exuberance that seems only to inhabit those still in teendom.

Here’s hoping they enjoy it, because being able to get away with completely copping every hook and every look from your favorite bands can only last so long and get you so far before people start calling you this decades Stone Temple Pilots. Not that that hasn’t already started to happen to Born Ruffians, who seem to be creating quite a backlash in certain circles. Give ‘em a Google and you’ll soon see a whole lot of words like “pretentious”, “contrived”, “derivative”, and “unoriginal” popping up. Best of all is that they’re saying it like it’s a bad thing.

This high-brow contingent of connoisseurs adamantly ascertains that rock & roll, by its very nature, is some sort of pure medium that must operate within the realm of “originality” at all times, at all costs. Guess I never got the memo because I’ve been operating under the model that rock & roll is largely great because of, not in spite of, unoriginality. I mean really, go through your whole rock collection and throw away every album that is not wholly original and what are you left with? Not a lot is my guess. The whole “original” argument is a slippery slope of slop at best, begging some serious questions, not least of which being what do these people listen to then?

I thought rock & roll was a synonym for theft from the get go. At least that’s what folks steeped in the blues and those old “History of Rock” documentaries told me. I mean, it’s not like I don’t listen to Zeppelin because they shamelessly robbed Willie Dixon, or Dylan because he thought he was Woody Guthrie—that’s just plain silly. Almost as silly as the longstanding tradition of thievery in rock being called into question under the guise of purity and originality by people who call movies “films”, and who feel they are protectors of art with a capital “A” who apparently only listen to one or two albums they deem worthy of their standards.



I guess mine are pretty low, because I really like this debut EP by Born Ruffians; a mangy trio of northern hicks old enough to drive but too young to drink that just gets it right song after song on this six song stunner that clocks in at a measly quarter of an hour. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it’ll only take you about thirty seconds to know exactly who these guys listen to: the Pixies, Modest Mouse, Violent Femmes, and Talking Heads. Sure, it’s pretentious and derivative, but in all the right ways: passionate yet quirky vocals delivered in that oh so hip twitchy-paranoid yelp, spindly off-kilter guitar lines, kooky arrangements with enough hooks to keep you humming the tunes for days on end, a keen sense of humor, and a definite feeling that they don’t take themselves too seriously.

This is, after all, only rock & roll, and any aspirations for it to be anything else, namely ART, invariably lead us to the land of Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, so forgive me for opting to listen to this EP instead of digging out my Mike Oldfield and Alan Parsons Project albums. Apparently the people at the ultra-hip (and mainly techno) label, Warp Records feel that originality is not some sort of prerequisite for good music either, as they had no problem scooping the Ruffians up, believing they actually might even be the future of good ol’ alternative rock.

I realize I’m oversimplifying this whole “original” concept with how it relates to rock music; but not by much. We are, after all, dealing with an art form based on three chords and a 4/4 beat, whereupon originality comes into play more through variations on a theme than outright creation of a new construct or form. Subtle changes, or the merging of two or more genres, say punk and country, can therefore be viewed as original; to an extent. And to that extent the Born Ruffians EP can be seen, however blurred, as original—in as much as they don’t sound exactly like Modest Mouse on one track and then Violent Femmes on another and so on, but rather like all four at the same time.

So while originality could be argued here, I feel the Born Ruffians ultimately are not original, and that’s precisely what makes them so good, because if they didn’t pull it off as convincingly as they do here, no one would bother to bash them, and I wouldn’t be trying to get you to buy it. But I am, partly because I believe they have an uncanny passion for the music they play so well, but also because they’ve never made any bones about loving certain bands and copping their style. It would be a different story if they denied their influences, but they flaunt them the way any snot-nosed teens would. It’s not stealing, its rock & roll… simple, pure, fun, and above all, unoriginal.



Caveat Emptor: The sound quality of this EP varies song-to-song, from shrill and trebly to punchy and smooth. It’s as if it was recorded with the meters set to max, so your volume control probably won’t be able to go past 9 o’clock before the distortion rears its head.