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Taking Mangum’s recorded-on-cardboard lo-fi folk epics as their ground zero, TRAA turn in the best alt.debut of the year.
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Hometowns has an earthly fragility, folksy without being folky. Score another one for Canada.
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With more intensely vigorous drumming, more obviously personal lyrics, and a more blatant interest in glossy electro-pop, Edenloff's band carves out their own niche. It is one that masterfully blends the masculine and the feminine, the refined and the coarse, the dark and the bright.
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The Rural Alberta Advantage are an excellent Toronto band that before this year nobody outside of Toronto cared much at all about; here’s hoping their follow-up manages to capitalize on what’s good here to make something really memorable.
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Hometowns, the band’s just-reissued 2008 album, is a well-crafted bit of folk that needn’t stand on the shoulders of giants.
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Nils Edenloff's passionate songwriting comes across as both raucous (“The Dethbridge in Lethbridge”) and gently sweet (the harmony-rich boy-girl cupcake “Don’t Haunt This Place”), consistently marked by a joyful sonic ingenuity.
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UncutThe RAA's narratives are as expansive as the prarie where singer-songwriter and guitarist Nils Edenloff grew up, but they're also full of resonnant, intimate detail. [Aug 2010, p.94]
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All too often, that energy is lost when a talented young band like this enters the studio, and RAA do their best to transcend the limitations of their home recorded calling card, but that energy eating reaper follows Hometowns around like a cop car on a Saturday night.
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Under The RadarHometowns deftly hurls the civic pride of Sufjan Stevens and the unshorn shuffle of Deer Tick like a bale of alfalfa into a farm-bound pickup. The trio ultimately lacks the breadth or lyrical thrust of the premier artists on their R.I.Y.L list. [Summer 2009, p.82]
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Hometowns may not be the amazing album some had hoped for but it is an honest debut on many levels: sometimes great, most of the time decent and a good while just being there.
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The scope of Hometowns feels a little too narrow for such a dynamic sound. Still, the album is endlessly listenable and solid throughout.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 28
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Mixed: 2 out of 28
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Negative: 1 out of 28
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Oct 15, 2010
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Nov 12, 2011
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MarkAug 2, 2009This thing is great. The drummer is amazing, the songwriting is solid and the album is cohesive. What more can you ask for?