Employing the Blue Peter approach to the pop video, artful indie sextet Rah Rah’s promo for ‘20s’ utilises nothing more than a range of kitsch mail-order ornaments and garish 1970s wallpaper. But tracks that deliver choruses as gloriously contagious as this one don’t need elaborate enhancements. Hailing from Canada’s landlocked Saskatchewan, about as remote a region as can be found on a chartered map, the band have a new album, ‘The Poet’s Dead’, that is instrumentally inventive and pop-hook polished enough to require them to get used to far greater population densities at venues well beyond their native prairies. Single ‘20s’, in particular, has an eerie call-and-reponse vocal crisscrossing the verse, snaring the listener’s attention before exploding into life on that chorus, as multilayered harmonies declare over accelerating guitars: ‘I’ll spend my 20s on rock’n’roll/I’ll spend my 30s feeling old’. As for the charity shop video, well, it was always going to end in tears…
The Poet’s Dead is out now on Hidden Pony.
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