Beauty's Pride by Born Ruffians

In the lead-up to the release of Born Ruffians’ ninth album, Beauty’s Pride, the band’s singer/guitarist Luke Lalonde received a glowing endorsement from a notoriously hard-to-please critic: Luke Lalonde. “Whenever we finish a record, if I don't hate it, I'm usually just over it and I don't want to hear it again for a while,” he says. “Whereas when I put this record on, I actually think, ‘I like this! I think I might be a fan of this record!’”

We should take his opinion to heart—after all, no one’s in a better position to evaluate a Born Ruffians record than the guy who’s served as their principal songwriter for over 20 years now. When Lalonde, bassist Mitch DeRosier, and drummer Steve Hamelin left their hometown of Midland, Ontario in 2004 to make a go of it in Toronto’s vibrant post-Y2K indie-rock scene, the world was a very different place: “digital music” amounted to mislabeled files illicitly procured on Limewire after a five-hour download, mp3 blogs held kingmaking power over the underground, and social-media interaction was limited to checking out your friend’s band’s lo-fi demos on their janky MySpace page.

Since then, Born Ruffians have evolved as dramatically as the industry around them, gradually shifting from the precocious ‘n’ ferocious racket of their 2006 self-titled EP to the streamlined, studio-savvy indie-pop of 2013’s Birthmarks to the rousing E Street-inspired anthems of 2020’s JUICE. And their creative momentum has never wavered even when the logistics of keeping the show on the road got more complicated, due to lineup shake-ups, changing labels, and/or the general depressing economic outlook for indie-rock bands in the 21st-century. No matter what setbacks they encountered along the way, Born Ruffians continued to unlock new levels of productivity: the sessions for JUICE were so, ahem, fruitful, they yielded two companion releases (SQUEEZE and PULP).

But if you go back and read Lalonde’s interviews from that era, there’s a palpable sense of “what now?” coursing through the quotes. “I think JUICE might be the last straightforward rock ‘n’ roll album that we’ll make,” he told Apple Music at the time. “We've been talking a lot about consciously trying to make something different next time.” Prior to JUICE’s April 2020 release, Born Ruffians were already rethinking their onstage presentation, by inviting their old friend Maddy Wilde to join their touring line-up to play guitar and keyboards. But after the pandemic crushed those plans and the band reconvened to make a new record post-lockdown, that prospective touring lineup became a permanent in-studio entity. “When we started writing, I was like, ‘I feel like we need to get Maddy in for this, I think that's going to be really good,’” Lalonde recounts. “So she just became a full member of the band, jamming and writing and adding her parts. It just opened up a lot of doors for what we could do sonically.”

The moment you drop the needle (or cursor) on Beauty’s Pride, it’s clear Born Ruffians have made good on that five-year-old promise to rip it up and start again. Just as the introductory synth fanfare of Kid A’s “Everything In Its Right Place” instantly demarcated Radiohead’s career into before/after phases, the opening of Beauty’s Pride presents an equally disorienting about-face, with a flurry of fidgety beats and beaming electronics whisking you into the euphoric strobe-lit banger “Mean Time.” Says Lalonde: “I just wanted to write something dancey, something completely out of the mould of the band. I was not writing it as a Born Ruffians song, that's for sure. I was listening to Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’ from Trainspotting really loud while I was driving to the rehearsal space and then, when I started working on that song, it was sort of born out of that cinematic feeling of the movie in my mind.”

That said, “Mean Time” is consumed with matters more substantial than “LAGER! LAGER! LAGER!” Recording sessions for Beauty’s Pride began in the summer 2023, just as Lalonde was about to start another side project—i.e., becoming a dad. Now, it’d be a stretch to say Beauty’s Pride is a concept album about fatherhood—there are no songs here about the horrors of trying to change a diaper without a pack of wet wipes handy, or the meltdowns triggered by a lost stuffy. However, the album is rife with philosophical musings about the cyclical nature of life, and the need to make every second here count.

“With ‘Mean Time,’ I was reading Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak Memory, and I thought it was really beautiful,” Lalonde says. “At the very beginning, he writes about time, and how your life is essentially a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness, and how we're sort of existing inside of these bookends. Maybe that idea used to be sort of panic-inducing to me—I’ve had a fear of death since I was a really little kid. But, lately I haven’t been feeling that way. I just think there’s something more beautiful about that briefness of life, and how we don't really know what's in the before and after.”

Appropriately, “Mean Time” is itself a bookend, complemented by the penultimate partner track “In the Meantime,” which is a very different song—swapping out the former’s club-thumping beats for a Wildflowers-era Tom Petty folk-rock sway—grounded by a similarly existentialist rumination on how days can quickly accumulate into years when you’re not noticing. However, in between those two polar tracks, Born Ruffians make the most of their time. If not every song on Beauty’s Pride is so eager to follow “Mean Time” into the festival dance tent, Born Ruffians still seize every opportunity to infuse their traditional guitar-band format with futurist aesthetics, as if retrofitting an old gas guzzler with electric circuitry under the hood.

Unlike JUICE and its equally old-school predecessor Uncle, Duke & The Chief, this doesn’t sound like the sort of album Born Ruffians could just plug in and play live off the floor. Recorded with returning Birthmarks producer Roger Leavens, and featuring mixing assistance from Gus Van Go (Metric, The Beaches), Beauty’s Pride is a studio creation through and through. While it was a bit of a shock to see a scrappy indie-rock band like Born Ruffians get signed by UK electronic imprint Warp back in 2006, the tranquil textures and electronically manipulated vocals of “All My Life” would fit right in with its roster of ambient soundscapers today. Other tracks savvily reanimate classic alt-rock styles for these totally-wired times: “Supersonic Man” imagines Oasis writing songs that sound like 2067 instead of 1967; “Do” is a ‘90s Weezer jam taken over by Daft Punk’s robots; and “Athena” harkens back to that early ‘80s moment when anti-social post-punk bands started writing socially conscious pop songs with exotic and excitable keyboard melodies. (Lalonde describes it as a track that “dips into capitalist dystopia for a moment, but in a fun, danceable way.”) Even seemingly straight-forward motorik indie-pop cruisers like “What a Ride” and “To Be Seen” are threaded with swirling synth effects and processed vocal filters that heighten the overall sense of disorientation and delirium. But the album’s shapeshifting productions and stylistic detours are anchored by a certain thematic consistency—however accidental.

“I never have a solid album focus and always want to write as much as possible and then just choose the best song,” says Lalonde, who workshopped some 38 demos that were eventually whittled down to the finest 14. “But with my kid being born, that obviously becomes almost like a magnet for themes. And it extends to songs maybe weren't even necessarily overtly about him, but then I think, ‘This is actually a bit like a baby being born.’ Like when I was writing ‘Supersonic Man,’ I was just singing it and thinking, ‘I like the feel of this song,’ and I didn't overthink the lyrics. But then I realized, ‘This is actually giving me this visual of somebody kind of hurtling through a void, through space, and landing on a planet, and it’s metaphorically tapping into the feeling of a child being formed and born in this gooey womb and then being rocketed out into the world. There’s an alienness to that first breath in that first moment—we're all kind of born as aliens. So everything was drawn into that child/birth/pregnancy paradigm—all of those wondrous things.”

Likewise, while the title of Beauty’s Pride may hint at the physical and emotional bonds between parents and their offspring—a theory reinforced by a brief cooing cameo from the littlest Lalonde on the closing title track—the phrase has actually been bouncing around Lalonde’s head for a few years. Its origins date back to a trip Luke took to India to visit his wife, who was doing research on her Ph.D at a dairy-farm facility over there. Upon borrowing a friend’s glittery purple child-size bike for a leisurely day ride, he noticed the words “Beauty’s Pride” emblazoned on the frame in big Disneyesque letters. Luke later discovered that the bike he borrowed that day didn’t actually belong to his friend—he had accidentally taken somebody else’s wheels. But his brief tenure as India’s most unwitting bike thief would fortuitously plant the seed for the album we have today.

“Where we’re normally scrambling at the 11th hour to find a title amongst the lyrics, something that sums up the feeling of the collection of songs we’ve assembled, this time we worked in reverse,” Luke says, “with the large, sparkling, purple light of ‘Beauty’s Pride’ guiding us all the way. When I got home from India, I went to a concert with Steve and told him I had the title for our next record, but no songs yet, and we set out to decipher what the words ‘Beauty’s Pride’ meant to us. Over the next few years of writing, we never wavered from the ‘Beauty’s Pride’ idea, and we even built a collective playlist to support its mood and vibe, and cited movies that we thought were or were not ‘Beauty’s Pride.’ Then all of a sudden, once Louie was born, the title became about him. It just made sense all of a sudden.”

But as much as it was influenced by the birth of his child, Beauty’s Pride also signifies the rebirth of his band. Perhaps the biggest surprise on the album comes in the form of “Can We Go Now,” a chillwavy psych-pop strut—coloured with Stereolab bleeps and vintage-videogame bloops—written and sung by Maddy Wilde. That makes it the first Born Ruffians track ever to originate from somewhere outside of Luke Lalonde’s brain—and, as such, completely blows open the possibilities of what a Born Ruffians song can be.

“When you see Maddy onstage, she seems extremely extroverted, but she can be a little bit shy, too, so I had to ask her a few times to bring some songs in before she actually did,” Lalonde says. “And finally, she brought this one. It was such a nice experience because it’s the first time that someone else has brought a song in. It's always me, and I've never begrudged that—I think it's one of the ways the band works well. But it was really cool to completely hand over the creative reins to somebody else. There are so many songs on this record that are centered around a keyboard line or melody that Maddy made up with. Her fingerprints are all over this album, and I think it's a great new ingredient in the Born Ruffians mix.”

So when Lalonde tells you that he’s really enjoying his band’s new album, he’s not being cocky or cheeky. He’s simply savouring a rejuvenating sensation that few artists get to experience as they enter their third decade of music-making. Pretty much all of the bands Born Ruffians came up with in the mid-2000s Toronto scene are long gone—Magneta Lane, Henri Faberge & The Adorables, and Wilde’s old band Spiral Beach, to name just a few. And last year, even their most successful peers—Tokyo Police Club—called it a day after a 20-year run. Born Ruffians have arrived at the point where a lot of bands give in to the nostalgic lure of album-anniversary tours, start contemplating the casino/fairground circuit, or call it quits. But the beauty of Beauty’s Pride lies in its refusal to accept any of those predestined fates. Rather, it presents Born Ruffians as the rare veteran act that can still make you feel like you’re discovering your new favourite band.

Born Ruffians have arrived at the point where a lot of bands give in to the nostalgic lure of album-anniversary tours, start contemplating the casino/fairground circuit, or call it quits. But the beauty of Beauty’s Pride lies in its refusal to accept those predestined fates. It presents them as the rare veteran act that can still make you feel like you’re discovering your new favourite band.

bornruffians.ca
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