The Orchard

Ra Ra Riot came out of nowhere with its debut, 2008’s The Rhumb Line, crashing the blogs and gathering at least a decent amount of attention from the critical community. It’s an incredible piece of work, a cathartic, emotional indie-pop experience, and, quite frankly, one of the most underrated and overlooked albums released this decade. Ultimately, though, having released its debut in the same year as first outings from critical darlings Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend, Ra Ra Riot seemed to get lost in the trend-setting shuffle.

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Sometime during the run-up to the release of Ra Ra Riot’s new album, I read that they somehow moved upwards of 60,000 copies of their debut record, an eminently un-shabby amount in this post-torrent era. 2007’s The Rhumb Line was hardly a weak record, but — befitting of their Ithaca origins — it was twee and liberally artsy both characteristically and in terms of content. Featured on that album (following an earlier Daytrotter version) was a cover of Kate Bush’s “Suspended In Gaffa,” which, while inferior to the original, signaled toward a potential direction for the future. As overtly dramatic as The Rhumb Line was throughout, the recordings sounded flat, and the arrangements were hardly as precise or polished as would have best suited the material, never matching the standard set by albums like The Kick Inside or Hounds of Love. Still, that emotional excitability, that shaggy looseness, struck a nerve, and Ra Ra Riot attracted a larger following than they could have anticipated.

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Being friends with Vampire Weekend would've helped any band in 2008, but it was particularly beneficial to Ra Ra Riot and their relentlessly charming debut, The Rhumb Line, whose college rock came in similarly preppy tailoring. Plenty of this genre's practitioners have attended ritzy private schools, but these two bands sounded like it: melodically nimble and compact songs bedecked with chamber-pop sweetener and nods to 1980s art-rock. Of course, Ra Ra Riot never faced the same accusations of cultural appropriation or privilege (maybe because Syracuse isn't in the Ivy League?), but oddly enough, their detractors denounced them as even less edgy and more buttoned-up. Perhaps The Orchard is a reaction to that criticism; it pushes their stylistic range at the cost of hooks.

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