Good music, like good literature, or film, can take you deep inside the experience of others in ways you might not have foreseen. So it is that, by the end of this tiny gig by Hurray for the Riff Raff, roughly 130 people crammed into an east London pub basement are probably ready to rise up and embrace all our Puerto Rican sisters and brothers in the South Bronx. We are rallying round a New World Spanish phrase – “pa’lante!” – which means “keep on going”, sung repeatedly by Riff Raff songwriter Alynda Segarra.
Fist clenched, eyes scrunched with passion, Segarra ends her band’s main set with this huge new tune, Pa’lante. It is part candid autobiography (“I just want to fall in love and not fuck it up”) and part rallying cry (“To all who had to hide, I say: pa’lante!”). She is addressing not just her Puerto Rican roots, but pretty much anyone else who has ever felt excluded from a dominant narrative. Faintly recalling La Pasionaria’s No Pasarán! speech from the Spanish civil war (a slogan dusted off a few years ago by Russian liberal activists Pussy Riot), the song is a highlight of the Riff Raff’s gripping forthcoming album, The Navigator.
Tonight is the first time the band have ever played it live, reveals Segarra. We may be down a dark alleyway off Hackney Road, but we could well be watching a new figurehead of the American musical resistance taking her place on a far bigger stage. For the occasion, this former busking hobo – think Seasick Steve, but for real – is wearing a black beret.
It is a cliche to note that oppressive political times tend to produce outpourings of engaged art. Certainly, Ronald Reagan’s years in the White House in the 80s were bumper times for American hip-hop, hardcore punk and Bruce Springsteen. Due in March, The Navigator is sure to be just one of dozens of political albums released in the US the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, but it is sure to be one of the most significant, personal and listenable.
Hurray for the Riff Raff play roughly half of it tonight. Anyone who came on board for their breakout 2014 masterpiece Small Town Heroes will remember a very different band and a very different sound. Gone are the personnel and the bluegrass, folk and blues influences that made the New Orleans-based troupe harbingers of a new kind of wide-ranging, inclusive Americana. Tonight, when the Riff Raff play Blue Ridge Mountain from Small Town Heroes, it is without the prominent fiddle of Segarra’s longtime foil, Yosi Perlstein.
This Riff Raff are, in fact, a brand-new band, able to take on Segarra’s pugnacious new music, a sound redolent of her roots in urban New York, rather than her adopted south, full of humid, florid nuyorican feints and swaggering troubadour rock. (The keyboard player, modelling her organ flourishes on Garth Hudson from the Band, is, incidentally, the spitting image of a young Patti Smith.) This rousing five-piece can play a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son in the encore and make it sound like the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil. The song was originally about privileged kids dodging the Vietnam draft; there are no prizes for guessing which commander-in-chief it is addressed to now.
New lead guitarist Jordan Hyde is a magical presence throughout, coaxing elegance from his semi-acoustic on another new gem, Nothing’s Gonna Change That Girl (“a song about not giving up”, says Segarra). The song starts as a ballad, then takes a left turn into Latin prettiness.
On many of the new songs, Segarra puts down her acoustic guitar to focus on singing. Hungry Ghost is another autobiographical pop song (“I’m ready for the world”), one with an audible debt to Springsteen. The video, which hit the internet earlier in the day, features a glam, dressed-up Segarra and pays tribute to Californian live-work venue Ghost Ship, gutted by fire, which prompted wider closures of semi-illicit punk rock and queer spaces.
As well as funk, there’s an Afro-Cuban vibe to another new song, Rican Beach, and some incandescent soloing from Hyde. “Now all the politicians, they just squawk their mouths, they said, ‘We’ll build a wall to keep them out’,” Segarra sings pointedly. “Now the poets were dying of a silence disease/ So it happened quickly and with much ease,” she continues. The song concludes: “I’ll keep on fighting till the end.”
