The Rural Alberta Advantage, Mercury Lounge, NY

’s lead singer Nils Edenloff is sick with a sore throat, and it’s hard to imagine how he has made it through shows over the past two days - or for that matter, how he is going to make it through the band’s second set later tonight. But for now he’s gutting it out through a full-length set, and while his rough voice takes the performance’s musical quality down a notch or two, it also seems at times to up the emotional impact of the songs.

The band open with ‘The Ballad of the RAA’, and the audience quickly realize that something is the matter with Edenloff, his voice cracking on some of the more intense vocals. After that song, though, Edenloff explains what is going on and that he is going to push through the show anyway. From that point onward, the crowd becomes sympathetic and supportive, their sing-along vocals sometimes covering for him when he can’t quite get a word out.

As the band move into some of their darker material, Edenloff’s rough voice adds an extra charge to the emotional content of the songs. On pieces like ‘Frank, AB’, about a rockslide that destroyed much of a Canadian town in the early twentieth century, his cracking delivery seems to go perfectly with the desperate lyric - reminiscent of Kurt Cobain in his most tortured performances.

The emotional climax of the set is a new song, also about an Alberta natural disaster. Edenloff explains before the song that it’s about a tornado that ripped through Edmonton in the summer of 1987, an event commonly remembered as “Black Friday”. He warns that the song is especially bad for his voice, and indeed, it sounds to be one of the most difficult of the set. But the bleak song’s chorus includes the repeated line “I let you die”, and it seems only natural that his voice would break there anyway.

Despite the circumstances, the band play an encore before exiting the stage and walking out through the assembled crowd. The earnest and adoring fans get many a pat on the back and many a word of gratitude for Edenloff and his bandmates on their way out.