Hurray For The Riff Raff – The Past Is Still Alive (2024) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Hurray For The Riff Raff – The Past Is Still Alive (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 36:46 minutes | 729 MB | Genre: Folk Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nonesuch

With the announcement of their latest and most liberating album to date, Hurray For The Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra, they/them) opens the doorway to a language and world that are finally their own. The Past Is Still Alive represents a new beginning in Segarra’s lauded evolution as a storyteller. During a period of pain and personal grief, they found inspiration in radical poetry, railroad culture, outsider art, the work of writer Eileen Myles, and the history of activist groups like ACT UP and Gran Fury. Discovering a stronger, more singular style of writing, Segarra uses their lyrics as memory boxes to process their trauma, identity, and dreams for the future. They immortalize and say goodbye to those they have loved and lost, illustrate the many shapes and patterns of time’s passing, and honor the heartbroken and the hopeful parts of themselves, as they deliver a first-person telling of their life so far. It is both a memoir and a roadmap, and though The Past Is Still Alive was made in North Carolina and produced by Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Kevin Morby, Waxahatchee), the Bronx-born, New Orleans-based Segarra brings listeners to places far beyond: vivid experiences of small shops and buffalo stampedes in Santa Fe, childhood road trips to Florida, struggles of addiction in the Lower East Side, days-long journeys to outrun the cops in Nebraska, and more, across their most magnetic collection of songs yet. “The Past Is Still Alive is an album grappling with time, memory, love and loss, recorded in Durham, NC a month after losing my Father. ‘Alibi’ is a plea, a last-ditch effort to get through to someone you already know you’re gonna lose. It’s a song to myself, to my Father, almost fooling myself because I know what’s done is done. But it feels good to beg. A reckoning with time and memory. The song is exhausted with loving someone so much it hurts. Addiction separates us. With memories of the Lower East Side in the early 2000s of my childhood, mixed with imagery of the endless West that calls to artists and wanderers.” – Alynda Segarra/Hurray For The Riff RaffInfused with the spirit of Peter Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Alynda Segarram aka Hurray for the Riff Raff, felt a duty to raise their own voice in protest against injustice. But as the title here suggests, age and mortality has given Segarra perspective and turned autobiography into the most vital subject. Born in the Bronx but having long been based in New Orleans, Segerra has christened their brand of folk rock “nature punk.” The personal trauma of their father’s death a month before the recording sessions may be the spark behind a tune like “Snake Plant (The Past is Still Alive),” which begins: “I only ever wanted to be a good daughter.”

Vivid snapshots of a life spent bouncing from coast-to-coast flash by: “Campfire on the superfund site/ Garbage island fucking in the moonlight/ Play my song for the barrel of freaks/ And we go shoplifting when it’s time to eat.” After a stark warning seemingly born of experience (“Test your drugs/ Remember Narcan”), Segarra cuts to the sinew, “I was young when I left home/ I never stopped running/ Used to think I was alone/ But nothing can stop me now.” Singing about being “very vulnerable, very fair, very raw,” has softened Hurray for the Riff Raff’s melodies.

The Past is Still Alive was recorded in North Carolina in the studio of Brad Cook, who also recorded and produced its predecessor, Life on Earth. (Drummer Yan Westerlund, guitarist Meg Duffy, fiddler Libby Rodenbough, saxophonist Matt Douglas, and multi-instrumentalist Phil Cook, all return.) On an album full of laments, “The World is Dangerous,” a slow waltz-like duet with Conor Oberst, is the moment where tenderness breaks out into the open. Although Segarra opens with the assertion: “Your dreams are not your dreams/ They’re only visions of what you need … Everyone’s looking for someone to use,” they continue that they “Won’t stop dreaming/ Because this world is dangerous.” It’s a telling portrait of an artist practiced at torturing themselves but also aware that life, in the end, may actually be worth the trouble. – Robert Baird

Tracklist:

1-1. Hurray For The Riff Raff – Alibi (02:48)
1-2. Hurray For The Riff Raff – Buffalo (03:42)
1-3. Hurray For The Riff Raff – Hawkmoon (03:42)
1-4. Hurray For The Riff Raff – Colossus of Roads (02:45)
1-5. Hurray For The Riff Raff – Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive) (04:07)
1-6. Hurray For The Riff Raff – Vetiver (03:52)
1-7. Hurray For The Riff Raff – Hourglass (02:50)
1-8. Hurray For The Riff Raff – Dynamo (03:07)
1-9. Hurray For The Riff Raff – The World Is Dangerous (03:45)
1-10. Hurray For The Riff Raff – Ogallala (04:59)
1-11. Hurray For The Riff Raff – Kiko Forever (01:02)

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