“I broke a string cause I was excited and played too hard” muttered bassist, Mitch Dressier, of Canadian collective Born Ruffians, last night at Bowery Ballroom. Proving to be a truly original force of catchy hooks and guitar riffs, the band celebrated its most recent album release, RUFF (2015) with a career spanning set that bounced around from the immature, plinky-plonky pop they made in 2008, to the more mature, well-produced, less sporadic indie-rock they make in 2015.
While RUFF has garnered some mixed reviews since its release this month, the band’s live performance, which has always been known as a spectacular display of ferociousness and energy, was exactly that. Whether the band’s been plagued with this inability to differentiate their sound, or craft something entirely new, is beyond me. But the truth is, even if they’ve been doing this sound for the last 10 years, and many bands have come and gone since then, there isn’t a band that does the purposefully-messy, hum to a howl, indie-pop as well as they do. So, upon reading all the unpleasant articles stating that the Born Ruffians have overstayed their welcome in the music industry, or have wrapped themselves in the same cocoon they’ve been trying to evolve from for the last ten years, I say to you this: “eat shit, they did it”.