The Rural Alberta Advantage
The Rise & the Fall
SADDLE CREEK
As the years go by, the pandemic is becoming a source of such diminishing returns for musicians that one wonders if COVID might eventually lose its artistic worth altogether. As it turns out, the emotions and challenges we all dealt with universally are closely tied to the quandaries that most of us face in our daily lives anyway. Loneliness, isolation, existential dread—while those feelings felt so raw during the lockdowns, they were hardly novel. Somewhere, the pantheon of deceased Russian literary giants guffawed at us when we used the word “unprecedented” and struggled to spend time by ourselves.
Which brings us to The Rural Alberta Advantage and their new album, The Rise & the Fall, which, from start to finish, documents the struggle between self and stark reality. Tapping into themes as commonly discussed as romance to more unusual ones we’d rather forget (like COVID), the Canadian trio’s fifth record is an emotional cleanse of sorts. And it’s one that we can all learn from if we take a lesson from RAA and similarly dispatch our residual anger and sadness over tragedies of the past through self-expression.
And boy, has RAA frontman Nils Edenloff mastered the art of self-expression since the Toronto band formed in 2005. Six years elapsed since RAA’s last album, The Wild (this new collection also folds in their 2022 EP The Rise), but Edenloff’s wisdom appears to have grown immensely during that time frame. Perhaps more importantly, the frontman who’s talked openly about the “mental anguish” of writing songs had more years than usual to stare at a blank page. The band even tried using ChatGPT to alleviate some of Edenloff’s writing anguish, but—surprise—the animatronic alternative didn’t sound as authentic as RAA.
It’s a good thing that experiment didn’t work, because as the best art comes from inner turmoil and pain, RAA’s greatest strength—by a long shot—is that they wear their hearts on their sleeves. “CANDU,” “3 Sisters,” and most of “Lifetime” serve as relatively mild tracks functioning as a warm-up. But then the latter track bursts open with an explosion of hopefulness, which is always the underlying appeal of RAA’s loudest material. Just like after a breakup, the perfectly named Rise & the Fall features peaks and valleys of mood and intensity throughout. But as Edenloff sings on the “Plague Dogs” chorus: “Everybody’s running out of time / Everybody’s coming after you and I / Everybody’s running out of time / Even me and you.”
The Rise & the Fall is like a See’s Candies sampler of a record; every song is charged with a different feeling, and you don’t know which one you’ll get when you press play—but your sweet tooth will be thankful after you've ingested the whole box.
