BORN RUFFIANS
Canadian indie-pop outfit Born Ruffians are everything you would expect from the 'next big thing'. Their debut, 'Red, Yellow and Blue', is a joyful and infectious album with a fresh sound and catchy songs. Bassist Mitch DeRosier sat down to chat a little about their music, but in the end it was just two geeks talking about comics, video games and appearing on 'Skins'.
By Steve Muller
"Geek is a harsh word," Mitch laughs, recovering at home in Toronto after touring and throwing Nintendo DS tantrums on travel days. One look at the Born Ruffians' MySpace page will show you why anyone would think they are. The page is littered with Marvel Comics references, opening with a quote from Professor Xavier of the X-Men and the band proclaiming they are 'the next link in the evolutionary chain of contemporary pop music'.
"We all enjoy comics, but I think Steve [Hamelin - drums] would be the main geek with the comics especially," he explains. "I guess that's how those references slip into our everyday nonsense. We read comics mostly while we were recording actually." Given the lyrical cohesiveness of the album, did reading comics have an effect when writing it? "Not yet," he says. "Maybe in the future we'll write these epic space battle songs, where lyrically or even instrumentally it sounds like a space battle. So you never know, it could pop in there."
Another area of popular culture the Ruffians have become involved in is their appearance on the British teen drama, 'Skins'. The show's cult following has allowed the guys the chance to reach thousands of people in the UK, weeks before their album has even been released there. "The gist of it is we were performing in a bar. We're the band that's playing in the background but they show us, and our song is playing obviously, in just a big club scene," Mitch explains.
"We had never heard of the show, because we don't get it in Canada and I don't think it's even in the States yet. But our manager is British and obviously our label is based in the UK. They were saying, 'Look, you have to do this, it's a really big show,' and we were just like, 'Okay'. We told our British friends, 'Oh, we're going to be on 'Skins',' and their jaws would kind of hang open," he recalls. "It just doesn't translate for us because we don't understand how popular the show is, but we've already had people on our MySpace saying they saw us on 'Skins' and they checked us out because of it."
Television appearances aside, the Ruffians' hootin' and hollerin' throughout the album 'Red, Yellow and Blue' will surely lure people in on its own accord. "I think when we write songs we write them in the simplest form of complex, or the most complex form of simple we can," Mitch says. "We want to have that ability where you listen to a new song once and know it's catchy, but then by maybe the fifth or sixth time you listen to it you notice all the complexities that are starting to show up through the song."
'Red, Yellow and Blue' is out now though Inertia.
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