A couple of months ago, "The Air" turned up in my ipod shuffle when I wasn't expecting it and literally stopped me in the street. It's a quitely stunning song: its lovely accoustic guitar figure, and Nils Edenloff's raggedly unpretentious vocals about cleaving and leaving: a lover, a town, a life. It's the the best track off an amazing album: Hometowns was a very Canadian record, and yet very universal, an album about place: about the trek from the formative places that shape our identities to the bigger, riskier places where adult things happen. Maybe it's in simple deference to its greatness that RRA don't mess with the formula at all on their latest LP, Departing. This play it safe strategy insures that the record is pretty good. "Muscle Relaxants" and "Barnes' Yard" in particular are fine additions to the RRA song catalogue. Listening to Departing over the past couple of months though I can't shake the awareness that I've heard nearly this exact same thing done better, more poignantly, a few years ago. Given how convincingly RRA capture the stickiness of where you come from, it's fitting that they haven't got beyond it, shook it off, just yet; but one thing about leaving home and moving on is that, eventually, you do in fact have to move on to something new. Next album maybe.
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