Alynda Segarra, the leader of Hurray for the Riff Raff, is an example of how the most unwise life decisions can lead to great things. Born to Puerto Rican parents and brought up in the Bronx by an accommodating aunt and uncle, Segarra, who is non-binary, ran away at 17 to lead an itinerant existence, hopping freight trains across America.
Washing up in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Segarra played in street bands, lived on handouts and displayed a way with a tune that sounded like it had always existed. Daniella, a flirtatious beckoning for a straight woman to come over and bat for the other team, is an early classic that made it on to David “The Wire” Simon’s New Orleans-set television series Treme.
Segarra writes songs with an old world sensibility, bringing in touches of folk, blues and John Lennon-esque rock to capture the American spirit in a unique fashion. Hurray for the Riff Raff’s latest album turns to Segarra’s past for a series of portraits of self-exiled lives and it rolls along with all the charm of a rickety streetcar.
“You don’t have to die if you don’t want to die,” begins Alibi, a lilting country-rock ballad on which the singer tries to talk a fellow freight train hopper, whose needle track marks are poking through a hoodie sleeve, into finding a reason to live. This great American adventure comes across like an On the Road for the age of face tattoos and fentanyl addictions. Hawkmoon is a heartland rocker about being quizzed by strangers on a Greyhound bus, while Buffalo is a campfire singalong about leading an itinerant life against the odds in modern America. “This year tried to kill us, baby,” Segarra sings. “Well, good luck trying, you can’t catch me.”
Coming with a generous helping of impending environmental apocalypse, all of this rather romanticises gutter punks, the dreadlocked, army surplus-clad individuals who can be found huddled together on the streets of cities across America. “They don’t even really know my name. I’m so happy that we escaped from where we came,” Segarra sings of dishevelled compatriots on Snakeplant (The Past Is Still Alive), documenting a lifestyle of shoplifting for food, sleeping under bridges and accidental overdoses. Hourglass, a love song recalling Bob Dylan at his most tender, finds Segarra still feeling like a dirty kid as they move out of street life and into higher society. “Hiding from the cops in Ogallala, Nebraska,” begins Ogallala, a Hank Williams honky tonk-style tale of searching for the real America while suspecting it may have been and gone.
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There is an end-times mood to this record but the music and vocal delivery are so accomplished, so clean, melodic and catchy, that a suggestion of hope and ambition runs through it too. It’s an evocative ode to America’s dispossessed, rooted in the present but, as the title suggests, also steeped in its past. (Nonesuch)
★★★★☆
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