Ra Ra Riot is a band full of surprises.
When the pack of rollicking Syracuse grads burst onto the scene under the name Ra Ra Riot, the music world may have expected a lot of shrieking and wigging out. Young, aspiring bands with “riot” in the name have a history of anarchical cries against civilization. But what the music world heard was much different – their debut album _The Rhumb Line_ was orchestral and somber, and they made playing the violin cool again.
Now, five years after that first album, Ra Ra Riot is surprising us all again. Released on Jan. 22, _Beta Love_ is like nothing the band has made before. It’s weird, trippy and has synth hooks that would bring a smile to the face of any MacBook-loving electro band. While past albums seemed like personal reflections, _Beta Love_ is a sprawling look into a futuristic world – like something out of a William Gibson novel.
If Ra Ra Riot has taught us anything, it’s that we may never have the band figured out. We talked with bassist Mathieu Santos about the new sound, violins and playing street hockey at The Blue Note.
**[MOVE]:** You guys have been together since you formed at Syracuse way back in 2006. So are you guys still getting along, or are you clawing each other’s eyes out yet?
**[Mathieu Santos]:** _(Laughs)_ Well, actually, it’s still great. We still have a lot of fun together, surprisingly. It’s especially surprising to me because we weren’t really friends before the band formed, so we were essentially just a bunch of strangers who got together and improbably all ended up liking each other. But yeah, we’re still having a lot of fun together.
**[MOVE]:** There’s a video on YouTube of you guys backstage at “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and (lead vocalist) Wes Miles is pretending to hit you in the face with a shoe. Do you guys still have this much weird, goofy fun on the road?
**[M.S.]:** Yeah, there’s a lot of it. We’re so used to – we just have spent so much time with each other over the past number of years in such close quarters. We joke around a lot that we’re like a family, but especially because of the mixed-gender dynamic. And we’re all pretty close in age, but there’s about a three or four year range between us. So that’s a pretty familial dynamic, a lot of like brother and sister kind of love and joking and horseplay.
**[MOVE]:** Do you ever have disagreements in the songwriting process?
**[M.S.]:** Yeah, there’s always little things that come up like that, but over the years we’ve been trying to get better and better at that process. It’s a process that we take very seriously, and we always are trying to get better at putting the song and the music first before any of our individual desires or egos or anything. But yeah, I think we’re pretty lucky as a band there.
There’s never really been any big blowouts or shouting matches or anything like that. And we’re constantly evolving our writing and arranging process and getting better and better at working with each other.
**[MOVE]:** Since you’ve been together, Miles has gone on to work with the band Discovery, and you yourself have come out with a solo album. How does the band deal with these kinds of developments?
**[M.S.]:** Everyone’s really supportive, and we’re all in this together knowing that this band, Ra Ra Riot, is everyone’s priority and everything else kind of takes a backseat to that – it has to in order for this to work.
But at the same time, we all know that everyone in the band is a creative person and naturally has to have other outlets to be able to do things that they couldn’t do within the context of the band. It’s weird that we have enough free time to work on other projects, but when the opportunity does come along everyone’s always supportive and interested in what each other’s up to.
**[MOVE]:** It seems like when a lot of high-profile bands start losing members to solo ventures; it’s a sign of the end times. That’s not the case here?
**[M.S.]:** No, actually – we’ve gone through a lot of lineup changes over the past few years, and I think just within the last year we kind of felt for the first time that things have finally settled and that we’re finally functioning completely as a unit and as a band.
Yeah, I can understand how when other bands – when things like that happen – it’s that the group dynamic sort of lingers off. But I think in our case, it’s been almost like a refinement over the years … and I feel like the general feeling is that we’ve been getting along and having fun recently more than ever.
**[MOVE]:** Can you tell us a little bit about this new album?
**[M.S.]:** Well when it came time to start working on this record – you know, we had the first two records, and we kind of had the same process the first two records of writing and arranging, which was beneficial for us. But over the years, that started to feel like it was a bit rejective … someone would bring in a song, and then everyone would just pile on top of it.
There would be a cello part, a violin part, a bass part, a guitar part and all of the songs ended up being incredibly dense, and that served us well and we learned a lot from that. But I think this time around, we just wanted to shake things up a bit and be more conscious of what the song needed and what the song required from us, as opposed to everyone just making up their own parts. So we sort of just bought into this attitude of putting the song first.
**[MOVE]:** The new album has a lot more electronic influences than earlier albums. Were you guys worried about becoming a gimmick? Like, becoming “the band with the violins” or “the band with the cello”?
**[M.S.]:** A little bit, but that didn’t really have anything to do with our decision to change the sound. To us, it was always funny, because when we’d get together it was just like – to us, it’s hard to have a perspective of yourself – so we were just like, “Oh yeah, we’re just a band, we’ll be happy if we can make something out of this.”
And everyone really latched onto the fact that we had strings, which to us wasn’t the central meaning of the band. But yeah, it’s funny because I guess it’s just something that’s a little bit different so it’s easy for people to pick up on and latch onto it. There were also people who criticized us for the first album for having too many strings or relying too much on strings, then when we came out with this record, there were a lot of people criticizing us for not having enough strings.
**[MOVE]:** So it sounds like you try to not read too far into what the critics say.
**[M.S.]:** Yeah, I think for the most part none of us really pay attention to any of that stuff. But it comes up from time to time – people bring things up to you or you come across something accidentally. But you can’t really take any of it seriously, even the positive reviews. We’ve gotten a lot of positive reviews, just as much as we’ve gotten negative ones. At the end of the day, it’s all the same. If people like it, it’s nice; if they don’t, that’s fine too. As long as you’re just doing what you feel is right, I think that’s the only thing you can hope to do.
**[MOVE]:** Obviously, you started out just playing small shows over in Syracuse, New York. Is it still a thrill to tour the country?
**[M.S.]:** Yeah, yeah, it’s still fun, and every time it gets a little bit more familiar, but it’s still exciting to see a few more people at each show. And yeah, next week we’re starting another two-month tour. We’re gonna go back out and do it again … that’s always been our cup of tea: the live performances. We tend to get a little antsy if we’re sitting around for too long, and I think being out on the road feels like where we’re supposed to be.
**[MOVE]:** On May 5, you’ll be here at The Blue Note. Have you ever played at that venue before?
**[M.S.]:** We have played that place, once before actually. We have a really, really fond memory of that show in particular actually. It was a really cruddy Monday night show – it was raining and cold and snowing. And it’s always the shows like that where you’re like, “Ah, no one’s gonna come, the weather’s really bad, it’s Monday night.”
But those are also the shows that end up surprising you as being the most fun. And I remember we had a really fun show and ended up having this crazy experience after the show where we ended up staying at the venue hours later and hanging out with the promoters and the bartenders. We had this sort of spontaneous party. We ended up bringing all of our street hockey equipment inside, and we were playing street hockey in the bar … I’m excited to be back there again … who knows what will happen this time.