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In Juan Gómez Bárcena’s 2023 novel Not Even the Lifeless, a former conquistador accepts a mysterious quest from the colonial authorities of Mexico. He should go away his spouse and residential, nevertheless it’s going to be price it—the job pays gold, and it ought to solely take two weeks. Off he goes, driving horseback into quite a few trials and tribulations, all of the whereas reassuring himself: Two weeks. Two extra weeks will do the trick. Two weeks is the least of his issues as a result of he’s not solely driving, he’s time touring—advancing by many years after which centuries, tripping and stumbling into future worlds the place the legends and prejudices of the previous frequently tackle new shapes. Finally he’s reincarnated as a migrant employee, hitching a journey on a prepare.
“Time can take you for a journey,” Alynda Segarra sings close to the highest of their ninth album, The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive. Relatively than horses, Segarra principally writes about trains, as a result of they used to hop a number of themself and due to the best way the prepare, the primary rhythm of rural industrialization, runs beneath the American blues and folks music that inform their profession as Hurray for the Riff Raff. That’s the shaky-steady ahead momentum driving The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive: half folk-punk memoir, half harm-reduction PSA, half non secular invocation and/or world-historical séance. The situation is: On the market someplace and the time is: Don’t you already know all time is related?
The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive represents a flip again towards extra historically Americana textures after 2022’s Life on Earth, a sort of digital rewilding mission that adopted the slicker, self-consciously conceptual The Navigator. The sound is dusky, naturalistic, one-third electrical and two-thirds acoustic; we see softness and pleasure within the human expertise and, lurking within the background, violence, fentanyl, and barrels of crude. Producer Brad Prepare dinner performs bass right here, together with a core studio lineup together with brother Phil Prepare dinner (piano, organ, Wurltizer, dobro) and drummer Yan Westerlund—what one may name the alternate-reality Megafaun, that includes two authentic member-brothers and the third member’s brother (behold, the ever-reaching affect of DeYarmond Edison).
Components from Segarra’s biography seem in flashes all through their discography however hardly ever as explicitly as in The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive, a vivid time travelogue that displays on Segarra’s youthful misadventures as a “soiled child” or punk traveler with humility, nostalgia, and transhistorical perspective. Within the retelling, shoplifting and dumpster diving for meals characterize each self-sufficiency and secret disgrace. And when you haven’t any place to go, a prepare will take you someplace. It’s definitely not the life-style for everybody: “Right here’s a silver spoon, you possibly can eat your coronary heart out as a prize,” Segarra taunts, or cautions, on spotlight “Hawkmoon,” a rollicking coming-of-age story honoring a trans mentor, Miss Jonathan, who’s assaulted and by no means seen once more.
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