New Music 2017 - Part 2 - Hurray For The Riff Raff - The Navigator

In my opinion there is never a bad time to welcome a new album from Hurray For The Riff Raff but, as it happens, early 2017 seems an especially propitious one for a number of reasons. Alynda Lee Segarra and her band are always ready to take on social, cultural and political challenges in their songs and there is no reason to think that things will change at least in that respect, this time around.

'The Navigator' - Hurray For The Riff Raff (ATO Records, 10 March 2017).

The Navigator - Hurray For The Riff Raff:

• Entrance
• Living In The City
• Hungry Ghost
• Life to Safe
• Nothing’s Gonna Change Girl
• The Navigator
• Halfway There
• Rican Beach
• Fourteen Floors
• Settle
• Pa’lante
• Finale

The lead track is Rican Beach, about which some reviewers have expressed surprise at the direction of the sound. I like it and even if that were not so I wouldn't be overly concerned. I'd actually be rather more worried if it just sounded like an out-take from an earlier LP and to that end I have pre-ordered the album. I have trust in certain artists, festivals and labels. Hurray For The Riff Raff is most definitely one of the former.

Rican Beach

So what is next?

Here is a song-and-a-half and now a suitably great video to go with it... Ooh. This attempt to embed Vevo video might not work out as intended first time! Let's just see what happens... I like meddling, but the real point is that this video is simply too good not to share.  It worked for six months and then it didn't.  Fair is fair. Here is a direct replacement.

Well it could have been worse; at least something happened now I have meddled with it some more and that's OK, at least for now. If you think that Alynda Lee Segarra is a tough cookie then you are right. That, however, is certainly far from the whole story.

She is also one of the most self-effacing artists that I have ever met.

End Of The Road Festival 2012.

New Music 2014 - Part 7- Hurray For The Riff Raff

Hurray For the Riff Raff has been around for a few years now, with once-itinerant Alynda Segarra at their steady helm. The third LP, Small Town Heroes, has recently been released by ATO Records in the US.

The UK release is the end of March but it is too good to wait for.

I'm expecting that I will see them at a festival in the UK at least once this summer and I can't wait...

Hurray For The Riff Raff live at End of The Road Festival 2012.
   

A track from the new album is 'Blue Ridge Mountain'.

This is another one to watch in 2014.

EOTR 2012 - Thoughts on new music...

One thing that really appeals to me about End of The Road Festival is the chances it offers to see new music. I mean that - new - in a variety of senses; some of it simply entirely new to me, some new to me live and some about which I am aware (or was aware of) but have subsequently forgotten to follow up.
I really haven't any preconceptions about how this post will unfold, hence this preamble!  I'm not even sure how or where to start. Indeed I have only written this in order to commit myself to actually writing it...
I'm going to have my dinner first and then, somehow or other, get going on this. One thing that is quite certain is that it simply won't work in any festival time-line way.
This is what I decided to start with and for a rather strange reason - listening to a 2010 UK modern-folk album 'One Light Is Gone' by Josienne Clarke.  The reason being that when I heard Hurray For The Riff Raff (live, it so happened) for the first time it had the same impact that hearing the aforementioned album did: that is the admonition-to-self  - "WTF?  Why didn't I already know about this?"

  

Hurray For The Riff Raff, Woods Stage, EOTR 2012 at 12:00, Sunday.

Suffice to say it was 'one of those moments' and that this is another band that I saw twice at EOTR 2012. I promptly purchased the 2012 album 'Look Out Mama', to which I am listening while writing. On reflection there are not many times that I have consciously found myself trying to work out lyrics to songs that I'm listening to live and hearing for the first time. When it happens three times, pertaining to totally different acts in the space of three days, it is becoming something of an addiction! It is likely to define the rest of this post.
It became no secret that Alynda Lee Segarra and her band much prefer playing small venues in the early hours but the pictures above were both taken on the outdoor main stage just after mid-day...

OK folks. Fourteen hours later, on the Tipi Stage, 2am Monday!

  

If you think the story of the evolution of Hurray For The Riff Raff is convoluted than it is easily exceeded by that of the next...

Kai Welch and Abigail Washburn opening The Garden Stage on Saturday.

Bluegrass tunes, but sometimes ones with Mandarin Chinese lyrics.

  

This one was a case in point.

Whilst she explained the bones of how this apparently odd but actually extremely likeable combination, at least to my ears, came about there is a fuller history to be found here.

The article finishes like this...

" [She played] a recently written murder ballad, her delicate frame dwarfed by the surreal dimensions of the cello banjo.

"It's a cut that didn't make the album [City of Refuge] because the producer thought it was too morbid," she explains. "But all the old-time tunes have a female victim. I thought 'How about writing a song which gives the girl a gun for a change?' "

  

She did not have the 'cello banjo at EOTR but she played the song nevertheless, with Kai Welch on acoustic guitar and backing vocals, and the whole set was a highlight of the weekend - if only one amongst many. That only goes to show just how strong and yet diverse End Of The Road Festival actually is.