Cory Branan - Adios

On his fifth full-length album, Adios, Cory Branan executes a dazzling collection of genre-crossing, silver-tongued songs with hearts of gold, whiskey breath, doses of regret and fury. Yet another wildly impressive entry into Branan’s already esteemed catalog, Adios is an addictive, sprawling 14-song output that whirls the listener into a musical gale of top-shelf songwriting, each tune as beguiling as the next for varying highs, that chugs along at expert paces and results in his finest record yet. At the very least, it’s a lock for the eventual top rungs of my picks for favorite albums of 2017.

Adios kicks off surprisingly and swiftly with the infectiously melodic Buddy Holly bounce of “I Only Know,” flanked by Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace and Dave Hause. “I was told this road goes straight to hell,” Branan sings on the album’s opening line before delivering the killer lyric “So what you gonna do with all that youth? Just because it’s brutal don’t make it truth” in the fashion Cory Branan does better and more consistently than any songwriter of his generation. Early single “Imogene” carries that torch even further, showcasing Branan’s drawled, seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary (“ne’er-do-well roustabout, detestable itinerate, execrable degenerate”) and wordplay (rhyming hemorrhaging and Imogene to subtle perfection). All of it would be great enough on paper, but Branan and his bandmates, Robbie Crowell (formerly of Deer Tick) on drums, keys, horns and percussion and James “Haggs” Haggerty on bass, propel “Imogene” and the thirteen other lyrically clever and striking constructions into indelible, catchy hooks and arrangements across the whole of Adios. With his idiosyncratic way with words as a songwriter’s songwriter and southerner, it’s never too much of a stretch to draw a line to Branan as at least some minor shade of modern day Mark Twain with a guitar.

 Twain is not the only great who comes to mind here, though: “Blacksburg” has more legitimate E Street shuffle and soul (check that glorious sax solo) than anything since The Rising, “You Got Through” channels a Tom Petty snarl with guitar-driven Heartbreakers kick, “Visiting Hours” rips into deliciously upbeat new wave a la Elvis Costello and the Attractions with helpings of Branan’s distinctive pathos and punk heart that surely Costello would’ve been happy to call his own in the glory days of Armed Forces. Shades of Springsteen pop up elsewhere as well, perhaps most noticeably in the River/Tunnel of Love vibe of the absolute knockout centerpiece “The Vow,” written in honor and praise of Branan’s deceased father. Even amongst all the other gems packed throughout Adios, “The Vow” and the late-album stunner of a duet “Don’t Go” (featuring Amanda Shires) each pack enough gut-punch power, pulsating life, and stop-you-in-your-tracks beauty to conjure feelings akin to reading some Great American Novel edited down to a five-minute song. What else can you possibly ask for from a rock and roll record these days? Well, if that’s a blistering, mad-as-hell, punk protest anthem to spit piss and ire at corruption and brutality rallying around a pogoing, poppy chorus befitting of the Ramones, Branan also has you covered on that front with “Another Nightmare in America.”

Adios is already a record I’ve eagerly lived with and obsessed over for weeks. It’s a towering achievement in an already strong year of rock records. Here’s to obsessing over it more in the months to come, with the speakers blasting, drinks in hand and lovers and friends close by to combat the dread of all the wretched shit clinging to the coattails of all those wolves just outside the door.

Adios is out April 7, 2017 via Bloodshot Records.

Hurray for the Riff Raff - The Navigator

The Navigator, the sixth album from Alynda Segarra under her moniker Hurray for the Riff Raff, is a rapturous statement of the personal and political at an exact moment when such considerations almost seem like the only things that really matter. It’s a rich, versatile and vital album brimming with a borderless sense of empathy and rhythm. At its core is a song cycle built around “The Navigator” – an alter ego named Navita Milagros Negrón – and her journey for a sense of home, love and meaning after hardships and wayward detours. Such was the journey for Segarra since gaining critical acclaim and touring in support of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s previous album, Small Town Heroes. Segarra departed from her residence and musical home in New Orleans back to the Bronx of where she grew up.

 

The album is a world of multicultural life and interconnectedness much like the look and feel of the people and neighborhoods Segarra grew up around. The song “Living in the City” fully immerses the listener in the album’s atmosphere with Segarra’s evocative chronicling of high-rise ruminations, rooftop views, dead gypsies and red-blooded life. Touches of Patti Smith, Rodriguez (both of which Segarra has referenced as inspirations), Buena Vista Social Club and folk-soul luminaries and street poets come to mind throughout The Navigator, but it’s not hard to hear how urgent every moment of this music is and how all of it is wholly inseparable from Segarra. Amongst mentions of the heart being a lonely hunter and concrete jungles, there is an honest, soulful filter of liberal empathy and proud heritage that anchors the journey. Compared to anything on the radio and most things released recently, The Navigator sounds like it is in its own passionate world, and it’s a world that should feel near and dear to many. Stocked with minor-key piano, guitar licks, samba and Puerto Rican rhythms, and doo wop flourishes, it is a Hurray for the Riff Raff concept album that plays out somewhat like a classic big-screen musical, especially if said musical bares its heart with sensibilities closer to Moonlight or Do the Right Thing rather than, say, the polished Technicolor Hollywood nostalgia of La La Land. Segarra’s showstopper here is undoubtedly “Pa’lante,” The Navigator’s alternately mournful and fiery six-minute climax that borrows its name from the radical group the Young Lords, pays structural homage to The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” and includes a recorded bridge of the poet Pedro Pietri’s “The Puerto Rican Obituary.” The song is a manifesto of empowerment and a call to arms for solidarity, and Segarra’s voice is utterly commanding. If there is one song to be taken away from The Navigator as a standalone totem it is “Pa’lante,” but its principles and genuine, human emotion are etched into every groove throughout the entire record. From the sturdy roots backbones of “Nothing’s Gonna Change That Girl” and “Life to Save” to the societal laments of “Rican Beach” and “Halfway There,” the striving American underdog spirit (unrestricted by ethnicity and gender) soars along between hard times and high times.

With The Navigator, Hurray for the Riff Raff has created a work of art to be celebrated: a personal triumph that is deeply relatable, a purely musical gem, and an impeccably performed, expertly arranged and sequenced song cycle that is unquestionably of the moment, is aware of what all that came before, and is still defiantly optimistic for what is ahead.

 

Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Navigator (released March 10, 2017) is out now via ATO Records.