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In the lead-up to the release of Born Ruffians’ ninth album, Beauty’s Pride, the band’s singer/guitarist Luke Lalonde received a glowing endorsement from a notoriously hard-to-please critic: Luke Lalonde. “Whenever we finish a record, if I don't hate it, I'm usually just over it and I don't want to hear it again for a while,” he says. “Whereas when I put this record on, I actually think, ‘I like this! I think I might be a fan of this record!’”We should take his opinion to heart—after all, no one’s in a better position to evaluate a Born Ruffians record than the guy who’s served as their principal songwriter for over 20 years now. When Lalonde, bassist Mitch DeRosier, and drummer Steve Hamelin left their hometown of Midland, Ontario in 2004 to make a go of it in Toronto’s vibrant post-Y2K indie-rock scene, the world was a very different place: “digital music” amounted to mislabeled files illicitly procured on Limewire after a five-hour download, mp3 blogs held kingmaking power over the underground, and social-media interaction was limited to checking out your friend’s band’s lo-fi demos on their janky MySpace page.
