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.