BY WILLIAM LENNON
In some ways, Born Ruffians are like a less self-serious Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or a more imaginative Cage The Elephant, but these comparisons don’t account for the bounce and crackle that is wholly unique to this Toronto four-piece. (Or their knack for sounding like a much larger band.) Born Ruffians excel at finding and accentuating the common denominators between the garage punk jam and the frontier ditty, and for over a decade now they’ve consistently delivered the caffeine and cigarettes drums over the pop rocks and Adderall riffs we’ve come to expect from them in glossy new packaging. Their most recent effort (2015’s Ruff) is no exception. The raggedy Ruffians are all about controlled chaos, starting tightly wound before unraveling in the ecstasy of absolute dishevelment.
