Listen to the audio version of this interview with Luke LaLonde
According to the band, the new release Say It from Canadian indie rockers Born Ruffians is “the project they left school to finish — a declaration that they’re smart and ambitious enough to make it on their own.”
They recorded the album over 2 1/2 weeks at the larger scale Metalworks studios in Toronto. Lead singer/guitarist Luke LaLonde said the decision to do this was an obvious one despite the venues’ lack of ‘indie cred’ “The price seemed ok, everybody seemed to be cool there and it seemed like an interesting place to record. It sort of has a stigma attached to it as being a ‘cheesy’ studio – especially in Toronto because a lot of mainstream records are recorded there.”
The stigma didn’t stop the band from choosing to use it and producer Rusty Santos (Animal Collective/TV on the Radio/Panda Bear) decided to push aside the digital recording systems for an old tape machine sitting in the corner: “They literally had to dust it off and fix it because they hadn’t used it in so long” Luke said “We ended up recording the whole thing to 2 inch tape, that was Rusty’s call.”
The record echoes some communication challenges the group have encountered recently. Drummer Steve Hamelin announced a year ago that he would be leaving the band after extensive touring for their previous record ‘Red, Yellow & Blue’. Lalonde revealed that a long, honest talk brought them back together and inspired the theme for Say It. “We kinda sat down, had a beer and talked about everything really honestly – it was the most honest conversation we’d ever had as band.” he said, “That’s where the title comes from, because through talking about the issues we realised the issues were really nothing. If we’d spoken to each other earlier, they wouldn’t have even been an issue.”
Despite the problems Hamelin had with touring, Luke mentioned their most recent Australian tour was really enjoyable for the group “That was actually meant to be the last tour that Steve did with us. It was just like a vacation.” Luke also said the band didn’t realise they had so many Australian fans “The shows were a huge surprise for us as far as how many people seemed to know our music and cheer for us, singing along. It blew our minds.” Luke revealed the band will probably be returning to Australia in January.
Born Ruffians also achieved a world first with their music video for ‘What To Say’ when they teamed up with director Jared Raab and artist/computer programmer Rob Bairos . The video depicts an animation of the band on an oscilloscope – a device usually used for monitoring in medicine and telecommunications.
Luke said it was the first time the device had been used to show such intricate images “The oscilloscope can only do one line images, so it’s tricky to animate a face. People have been trying to animate on these things for a while, but nobody’s been able to do more than simple shapes like a square or a triange.” Rob Bairos invented new software to translate the movements of the band into an audio signal that the machine can animate into the image.
Say It is available now via Warp Records.
