Ra Ra Riot Give The People What They Want at The Sinclair 9/24
CAMBRIDGE, Mass— It’s 2010. You have a crappy car. You have more than the legal amount of teenagers crammed into the backseat. Legally you all have a 12:30 a.m. curfew, which is fine since no one has any concrete plans past 8 p.m. anyway.
Instead, you’re all content to hold a few extremities out of the windows as you urgently drive down a back road towards nothing in particular. And then “Too Dramatic” by Ra Ra Riot comes fuzzing through your semi-shot speakers and the extremities outside of the car’s windows instinctively start waving up and down a bit more aggressively than before.
Ra Ra Riot brought the audience back to this sunny adolescent scene on Wednesday night at their free show at The Sinclair as a part of the Converse Rubber Tracks Live series.
On stage it was clear that the energetic band was coming off a decent period of inactivity—lead singer Wesley Mills announced that it was the band’s first show together in three months. He burnt off some of that pent up oomph with a lot of jumping and some classic hairography to hide the fact that his dance moves mainly consist of enthusiastic clapping. Mills was only to be shown up by Rebecca Zeller’s sparkly violin, because what says new-age opulence and beauty like a sequin plastered instrument?
Fueled by Mills’ spastic clapping, the band blew through hit after hit from their eponymous EP and subsequent studio albums from 2008 and 2010: “Boy,” “Too Dramatic” and “St. Peter’s Day Festival” all play in fairly quick succession. They stuck to the happy times, with a clear and mutual understanding between audience and band that no one wanted to hear much of anything off of 2013’s Beta Love.
Other band members took a backseat to Mills and the sparkly violin; disgruntled guitarist Milo Bonacci fooled with his amp for most of the set, while bassist Mathieu Santos, who is a dead-ringer for my father circa 1984, rocked out by himself in the corner. The unknown cellist, who played Alexandra Lawn’s parts in the songs off everything pre-Beta Love and bore an uncanny resemblance to Bernard the elf from The Santa Claus, just kind of chilled with her painfully cool, bare-boned electric cello.
The quintet, along with drummer Kenny Bernard, rocked out through the full set before taking a quick on-stage break and announcing that they would be doing a ‘fake encore.’
“You all know we’d be coming back out here in five minutes anyway,” Mills announced good-naturedly. “Plus who knows when we’ll be back here—gotta make it count.”
The low-maintenance stage presence went a long way with the crowd. Between the fake encore and the heavy amount of stage time given to old favorites from 2008, Ra Ra Riot clearly understands the number one rule of a tour with no new CD to promote—give the people what they want. Give them the sing-a-longs, the clap-a-longs and the high school memories.
-Emily Akin
