Weekly Roundup: Hurray for the Riff Raff, Jake Blount, Cinder Well

Week of Feb. 21: This week, Future Islands' return to TV, Hurray For The Riff Raff’s recipe for life on earth, and creepy folk from both sides of the Atlantic from Cinder Well and Jake Blount.

Hurray For The Riff Raff Examines “Life On Earth”

Alynda Segarra, Bronx-born but now New Orleans-based, has been making records as Hurray For The Riff Raff for over a decade. Her eighth album, Life On Earth, may be more than the sum of its parts. There’s no one song that rips your heart out quite like “Pa’lante,” her reclamation of her Puerto Rican roots from 2018’s Navigator, but over the course of eleven songs (well, ten songs and an enigmatic, ambient closing track), Segarra paints a portrait of life – and hope, and even joy – at a time of great uncertainty. “It’s not safe at home any more,” Segarra sings in the opening track, “Wolves,” part of the album’s sturdy rock-based beginning. The textures clear out in the middle of the album – “nightqueen” sounds like it could’ve been written by Lou Reed in one of his pensive moods; New Orleans-style horns bring a burst of color towards the end in “Rosemary Tears,” and it all leads up to “Saga,” a steadily building anthem – not of triumph but of determination in the face of adversity. “Nobody believed me” Segarra repeats at the song’s end – an ominous way to end an album that comes across as a warning and wake-up call, even if the message here is delivered with a swaggering R&B/rock’n’roll sound.  

Future Islands Debut New Single On The Late Show

Future Islands got a big break back in 2014 when they played their hopelessly romantic, synth-driven, irresistible song “Seasons” on Late Night With David Letterman – a career-making performance that prompted an excited reaction from the show’s famously diffident host. So it makes sense that they’d unveil their latest single, “King Of Sweden,” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. The chorus of the new song might sound reminiscent of the old one, but I doubt the band’s fans will mind. After all, lead singer Samuel T. Herring is still a hopeless romantic (albeit one who can occasionally drop into a shocking death-metal growl), and the band’s sound, reminiscent of 80s synthpop bands like The Human League and OMD, has proven to have surprising staying power. And if you’re not familiar with Future Islands yet, click that link above to watch their Letterman song, and then check out last year’s beautiful song and video “For Sure” to catch the band at its best.  

Jake Blount Returns With An Old Song And A New Sound

Jake Blount’s Spider Tales was one of the great surprises of 2020. Blount sang, fiddled, and banjoed his way through traditional songs, many obscure but a few quite familiar, and all performed through the prism of his own experience as a Black, queer musician in a field that has long suppressed both. Now, he’s back with a new single, and an electric guitar – but with the eerie vocal harmonies and earthy handclaps that keep this song rooted in the “old weird America” that so many old folksongs inhabit. It’s called “The Man Was Burning,” originally recorded by an incarcerated man named Joe Lee in the 1930s; full of strange, apocalyptic imagery, the lyrics were about the evils of gambling, but Blount has recast them to be about income inequality (“This is kind of my ‘Eat the Rich’ moment,” he says). It’s both unsettling and somehow swinging all at once – and catchy as hell.  

A First Glimpse At The New Samora Pinderhughes LP

Samora Pinderhughes has steadily built a reputation for writing and producing songs that take on weighty topics in an intimate way – protesting with a whispered invitation rather than a  shout. Racial injustice, police violence, home insecurity, incarceration… these could make for some pretty heavy sledding, but Pinderhughes, a self-described mixed-race kid from the Bay Area, tells his stories through quick series of images and phrases, allowing room for the listener to fill in the gaps and come to their own realization of what the song is “about.” His upcoming album, Grief, is part of a larger multi-media work called The Healing Project, produced by Anna Deavere Smith, Vijay Iyer, and Glenn Ligon, and which opens as an exhibition this spring at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The work is about incarceration, endemic violence, and the healing potential of the arts, and Pinderhughes’ first single is called “Masculinity,” a gentle ballad about how “toxic masculinity” can be most toxic to the man who wields it. Pinderhughes sings and plays piano with a somber, understated beauty, and as the song goes on, subtle but telling instrumental textures are added. The song finally takes flight in a keening sax solo by the redoubtable Immanuel Wilkins. 

New Doom-Folk From Cinder Well

Cinder Well is the work of Amelia Baker, an American singer and musician living in Ireland. She describes her music as "doomy folk from the depths" on her Bandcamp page, and that description seems to fit her haunted, timeless arrangements of Irish and Appalachian folk songs, and her own modern extensions of that tradition. Her latest EP is a collaboration with the English "progressive folk" musician Jim Ghedi. Their version of "I Am A Youth That’s Inclined to Ramble" starts off with just their voices, in simple but bewitching harmony, before expanding as the story plays out: a drone sneaks in behind them, and then eventually fiddle, guitar, and strings. The song is about a man leaving for America, but this version also gives us the perspective of the woman he has left behind. 

Singing Along With The Earth – A New Album From Field Works

Field Works is a project led by musician and producer Stuart Hyatt that involves using “found sound” – usually from nature – as source material for collaborative music-making. His last album as Field Works was a 2LP set called Ultrasonic built around the sounds of the endangered Indiana bat, with guest musicians like harpist Mary Lattimore and electronic artist Christina Vantzou. On April 1, he’ll released a new Field Works record called Stations, built around the sounds of the Earth itself. In this case, seismic waves (presumably converted into sound by speeding them up?) – of earthquakes, volcanic activity, but also just the throbbing of the ground beneath the surface – are used as the basis for music by Hyatt and another raft of collaborators. There are ten “Stations,” and so far, we’ve gotten to hear “Station 5,” featuring Hanna Benn, whose wordless vocals add an ethereal touch to this (literally) grounded music.