Pop Music Review : The Rankin Family’s Sweet Sound of Success

At the Galaxy Concert Theatre Tuesday night, Canada’s red-hot Rankin Family created music of such spiritual purity and beauty that a benediction and a passing of the collection plate wouldn’t have seemed out of place at evening’s end.

Instead, the group concluded its set as any band with Celtic roots would--with a secular ode to what guitarist and chief songwriter Jimmy Rankin called “going out and getting plastered.”

Such revelry was atypical, though: The show was dominated by the breathtakingly gorgeous vocal troika of Rankin sisters Raylene, Cookie and Heather. So pretty was their singing (and the four- and five-part harmonies when brothers Jimmy and John Morris Rankin chimed in) that the 11-member group had to beware of sinking in a sea of sweetness.

That’s a very real problem as the Rankins attempt to extend their popularity south of the U.S. border on this, their first full-fledged U.S. tour. Sweetness does mute the potential impact of their “North Country” album, their first U.S. release (actually a hybrid of their second and third Canadian albums).

So far, such problems don’t appear to have hurt them a whit at home. The group nabbed four Juno Awards--Canada’s Grammys--last year and has sold nearly a million copies of three albums in a country where sales of 100,000 qualify for platinum certification.

One might argue that they have achieved their level of popularity despite rather than because of the glossy album production. Even a sugary sheen can’t fully swamp these sisters’ rice-paper-delicate sopranos. Think of three Nanci Griffiths harmonizing in perfect sync.

As they demonstrated Tuesday, within the right musical framework, those voices can intertwine with spectacular results. Even though 11 of the 20 songs in the 90-minute set came from “North Country,” the softness of the over-polished album largely was overcome through instrumental arrangements with more bite. (The addition of uilleann pipes into the piano-guitar-bass-drums mix, however sparingly, might lend ideally edgy musical complement to those edgeless voices.)

“Gillis Mountain,” a simple celebration of a day in the sun, further benefited from an extra measure of exuberance that Raylene, who wrote the song, injected into her vocal. As for the traditional numbers sung in Gaelic, well . . . the inherent mellifluousness of that language, issuing from those angelic voices, could bring tears even if the lyrics were (and for all we know they are) urging beleaguered tenant farmers to stick fiery pokers under the arms of absentee landlords.

Jimmy Rankin’s original songs were inviting melodically but their lyrics struck the heart with less consistency. His “Tramp Miner,” for instance, is an earnest but unexceptional paean to coal miners that reads like a number from Gordon Lightfoot’s B-list.

One original that did evoke the same power as the best Celtic songs was the ballad “Fare Thee Well Love,” on which Jimmy and Cookie traded verses. The melody takes an octave leap at the word love that became chilling when Cookie reared her head back and let loose with every ounce of the heartache that can come with saying goodby to a lover.

Although Irish and Scottish are the most significant Celtic influences in the Rankins’ folk-pop-country music, the clan (from the city of Mabou on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia) exhibited traces of British reserve, at least in performance.

But the Rankins did seem genuinely sparked by singing and playing live--never more so than during two numbers when the three women moved to the front of the stage and literally kicked up their heels in buoyant Celtic dances.

The opening set by local rocker Jimi B. was as obtuse and impenetrable as the Rankins’ set was direct and accessible.

A longtime Toronto resident who said he has been living in Orange County for about 10 years, Jimi B. (for Bertucci) led his four cohorts through a handful of meandering original songs that included traces of ‘70s rock a la Steely Dan or Todd Rundgren with neither the sophisticated chops of the former nor the pop catchiness of the latter.