JOSH O’KANE
Canadian University Press

TORONTO (CUP) — Songs can take you places. You can wake up in a Soho doorway and a policeman might know your name. You can feel the Illinoise. You can wonder what the hell you’re doing drinking in L.A. at 26. You can discover that sleepy London town is just no place for a street-fighting man. And I suppose you can let Will Smith welcome you to Miami.

But how often do you find yourself running back to Saskatoon? Seeing constellations in Bobcaygeon? (We’ll ignore that night in Toronto.) Meeting future loves down at Halifax’s Khyber? It’s pretty rare that a Canadian song tries to float you down the river to the Musquodoboit Harbour.

Every song represents a time and a place, but some are more lyrically explicit about it than others. Nailing down a definitive place to a song can make it feel more real and more relatable, while romanticizing the place at hand. It makes people who’ve never left America pine for London or Berlin. It made Morrissey want to throw his arms around Paris. It makes 17-year-olds want to move to the smog-filled, dream-shattering hole of Los Angeles, for some reason.

But songs don’t often make you pine for Canada. Canadian cities are highly regarded for their scenes. For instance, Montreal’s music scene is highly romanticized. And there are endless numbers of quintessentially Canadian bands playing quintessentially Canadian styles of music. It’s more rare, though, for Canadian pop and rock music to perfect the romanticized inclusion of Canadian geographic imagery.

Enter the Rural Alberta Advantage. Their name, an adapted age-old marketing slogan for our oiliest province, evokes a Canadian-ness that’s so pure it’s almost cheesy. The respect they pay to the geography and imagery of the Great White North is anything but cheesy, though. The RAA, as they’re affectionately known, paint a picture of the Canadian landscape with a truly emotional brush.

Songwriter and frontman Nils Edenloff grew up in Fort McMurray, AB, went to school in Edmonton and now lives in Toronto. All three of these places play important roles in his songwriting. In the RAA’s debut album, Hometowns, Edenloff contrasted images of youth in Alberta with life in Toronto, with countless direct references in homage to each place.

Hometowns pulses with Canadian-ness. Mixing love stories, breakup stories and memories of home with one particular theme familiar to many young Canadians — the move from home to the big city. Forget a small-town girl living in a lonely world; Edenloff will tell you the story of his lonely and dark apartment in Toronto’s west end. It’s a resonating theme — New Brunswick, my home, is nowhere near Alberta, but hearing about Edenloff’s adaptation to Toronto hits me hard.

The RAA’s Departing, released digitally on Feb. 22, is an obvious companion album to Hometowns, but showcases lyrical maturing. The straight-up name-dropping of geographical references — think “Swap Garneau for Dundas” — are all but gone, but it’s still quintessentially an album about the Canadian landscape.

The album, like its predecessor, is raw and emotional, weaving love stories both real and imagined into the Albertan landscape.

“The Breakup” reveals its source material in its name, but feels all the more real when it adds to that pain the feeling of being stuck in Fort McMurray when the summer dies. “Tornado ’87” is a semantic follow-up to Hometowns‘ “Frank, AB,” this time swapping a rockslide for an urban tornado. Both blend the narrative of an Albertan tragedy with a heart-wrenching love story that can twist your emotions no matter where you were during the disasters.

In Departing, you also find an ongoing theme of Canadian winter: Ice, cold and finding someone to keep you warm from it — and then losing that person altogether.

And the music? The RAA are more than just lyrically powerful, but they’re a little more subdued this time. Drummer Paul Banwatt forces the band ahead with staggering momentum in many songs, just like he did on Hometowns, but none of them have the same adrenaline-surge rise-and-fall that the RAA’s last album provided. That’s not necessarily a negative, though. It could very well be another sign of the young band maturing. The music is still pretty good.

Edenloff and the RAA have taken the notion of place in song and found a way to Canadianize it, to make it feel natural without feeling cheesy. While bands like the Tragically Hip have always blended Canadian-ness into rock songs, they’ve always been quintessentially Canadian. The RAA pull off their Canadian-ness in a way that feels universal.

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image: Josep Marti/Flickr