The honey-voiced Alynda Lee Segarra is a Puerto Rican punk from the South Bronx who has spent most of her career in New Orleans crafting gorgeous reinterpretations of white American roots music.
The Navigator is her attempt to reconcile her disparate identities and shed the “shame” of her Nuyorican heritage.
It’s also an imaginary sci-fi musical about a wondering immigrant named Navita set to a collision of doo-wop, country and bomba cross beats with its finger firmly on the erratic pulses of Donald Trump’s America (and not only because the chilling Fourteen Floors appears to pre-empt his immigration raids).
Rican Beach presents a swinging groove punctuated by discordant guitar, over which Segarra hisses with anger at cultural appropriation and gentrification: “First they stole our language, then they stole our names/ hen they stole the things that brought us fame/Then they stole our neighbours, and they stole our streets/And they left us to die on Rican Beach.”
However, there’s a richness and an integrity to each song: Living in the City has the insouciant shuffle of Lou Reed’s Sweet Jane, Life to Save channels the Broadway-isms of Laura Nyro, while Nothing’s Going To Change the Girl finds those country ballad instincts still impeccable.
It’s such a New York album but reminds me in spirit of PJ Harvey’s war album Let England Shake: male folly brought home in female voice. And with Pa’lante she provides a rallying cry for America’s marginalised, at once plaintive and impassioned: “Do your best/and f*** the rest/Be something.”
(ATO)
