REVIEWS
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Powerful and Nuanced
Hurray for the Riff Raff The Navigator (ATO) I’ve been a hungry ghost/ So I travel coast to coast In New Orleans we watched Alynda Segarra grow from a ragged teenage traveler singing shyly on the streets of the French Quarter to the talented songwriter fronting Hurray for the Riff Raff. Her phenomenal progress continues on The Navigator, a coming-of-age statement that immediately places her high in the pantheon of singersongwriters from her generation. Segarra’s voice is powerful and nuanced on her strongest collection of material yet. Several songs on the album, including “Living in the City” and “Rican Beach,” are potential hits, but fans of her previous work may well gravitate to the powerful “Hungry Ghost,” a flat-out rocker that punches like a track from Patti Smith’s landmark Horses album. I’ve been nobody’s child/ So my blood started running wild The album concept is loosely based on the title, the superheroine avatar of a street kid named Navita who is trying to connect with her past in order to “pa’lante”—to move forward. The story mirrors Segarra’s own journey from her birthplace in the Bronx and
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her upbringing in a tenement surrounding, referenced in “Living in the City” and “Fourteen Floors,” to the self-realization she began to achieve hanging out on the Lower East Side of Manhattan listening to music, writing poetry and exploring her Latina roots as part of the Nuyorican Cafe group. The music ranges from the kind of folk ballads that her longtime fans will recognize in songs like “Nothing’s Gonna Change That Girl” and “Halfway There” to a daring mix of salsa, rap and rock featured on the title track, “Rican Beach” and “Finale.” I’ve been a heart for hire/ And my love’s on a funeral pyre “Hungry Ghost” resonates on numerous levels. Segarra has written about the tragedies that traveler friends of hers have suffered before, but this time she expands that view to include D.I.Y. spaces like the Ghost Ship in Oakland, where a fire killed 33 people last December. There’s no specific reference to the Ghost Ship in the song—“my love’s on a funeral pyre” could as easily be taken as a Jim Morrison reference—but the video, with its dreamlike dancers alternating with Segarra singing the words on a kind of altar, makes the connection. I’ve been a lonely girl/ Now I’m ready for the world I’ve seen some reactions on social media that indicate some of Segarra’s fans are uneasy with the new direction, but her ability to reach back and write about her life before traveling to New Orleans is a powerful sign of artistic growth. Segarra is incorporating clavé rhythms and Puerto Rican dialect into her songs, but she clearly is building on rather than abandoning the
lessons she learned on the streets of New Orleans. The last show of her current European/American tour will be at the Civic Theatre in New Orleans on May 5. That’s another sort of homecoming. —John Swenson
Tasche de la Rocha Gold Rose (Independent) Someday in the distant future, anthropologists may yet discover why a horde of hipsters obsessed with Billie Holiday and Django Reinhardt descended upon post-Katrina New Orleans like a plague of stylish locusts, devouring all the funk and soul and blues in their path. Tasche De La Rocha is among their number, charming residents by setting up shop on street corners with a folding chair and a Radio Flyer of equipment, yet she’s not exactly of them. It’s not so much her voice, which is one of the more affected and labored Holiday impressions out there; like too many of her contemporaries, she uses Billie’s breakthrough stylings to set herself up as yet another Romantic Pixie Dream Girl, the exact antithesis of the complicated, tortured love songs Billie (and let’s not forget, Ella) was known for. What’s special about this particular waif—and what takes a second listen to suss out—is that her little pledges of affection actually come with music to match. No ukuleles or torch songs here; this is classic ’50s doo-wop structure with a modern dream-pop and noise-pop aesthetic. Her latest effort actually manages to replicate the atmosphere of a little girl all alone in the big city, right up to and including the shrieking silences that surround her and the industrial musique concrète that connects the tracks. The effect is
less modern Hollywood rom-com and more like Charlie Chaplin discovering Paulette Goddard capering around the ruins of the new Gilded Age, a gamine with a backstory and an intriguing persona to boot. Most of these adorkable twee-porn practitioners come on as deep as Facebook memes, but here you feel the very real desperation and sadness behind the doe eyes. So if you see Tasche out on the street struggling to get by, slip her some money. Better yet, tag along with her. She’s impossible to write off for long. —Robert Fontenot
David Greely Shadows-on-the-Teche (Give and Go Records) Shadows-on-the-Teche is, arguably, David Greely’s most unusual recording yet in a storied career of eclectic solo projects and decades with Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys. Commissioned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation (owners of New Iberia’s Shadows-on-the-Teche plantation), the composer/fiddler and visual artist Lynda Frese were given a year to produce this album of thoughtful compositions and art. Luckily, family letters and other artifacts not destroyed in the Civil War (as on other plantations) www.OFFBEAT.com