Hurray For The Riff Raff Album Review: The Past is Still Alive
On The Past is Still Alive, the latest and best studio album from Hurray For The Riff Raff, Alynda Segarra looks back at a specific era of their life to pay tribute to chaos and imagine what could come from it. Their seemingly legendary but very real past is well-known by now: At age 17, Segarra left their home in the Bronx and hopped freight trains, played in a hobo band, and settled in New Orleans, a formative period of simultaneous struggle and freedom. That combined ethos has pervaded all Hurray For The Riff Raff records, but on The Past is Still Alive, Segarra's finally telling the tale, applying what they learned to the present day.
Notably, Segarra started recording The Past is Still Alive a month after their father died; while his voice appears literally on the album's final track "Kiko Forever", his musical uplift acts as a buoy for Segarra throughout the whole thing. Though they had worked with producer Brad Cook and drummer Yan Westerlund prior, Segarra had never recorded with the rest of the album's laundry list of stellar contributors, from Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, and Mike Mogis to guest vocalists Anjimile, Conor Oberst, and S.G. Goodman. That Segarra conquered a period of vulnerability to record the album with bonafide strangers is a terrific feat, but not necessarily surprising: This is a person who has the ability to treat even their fellow band members like the audience, recipients of some remarkable stories full of biography and symbolism alike.
Throughout The Past is Still Alive, Segarra alternates between timeless metaphor and hyper-specific details. On "Buffalo", they remark, simply, that "Some things take time," whether presently forming love or society's death-by-1000-cuts treatment of the oppressed. Segarra sings over strummed acoustic guitar and Mogis' pedal steel, the perfect accompaniment to earned wisdom. "Hawkmoon", on the other hand, is more electric, full of Duffy's bluesy riffing, akin to the epic sound of The Navigator, fitting for a song inspired by a lasting figure: the first trans woman Segarra ever met. As if to project to a stadium full of folks looking to honor Ms. Jonathan, Segarra sings a heartland rock-style salute: "She opened up my mind in the holes of her fishnet tights / Dildo waving on her car antenna and / I could've ridden shotgun forever." Pseudo title track "Snakeplant (The Past Is Still Alive)" juxtaposes both memories of chaos and lessons learned. As Segarra recounts shoplifting and having sex on top of an island of trash, they make sure to tell you what they took from a life among "the barrel of freaks": "Test your drugs / Remember Narcan / There's a war on people, don't you understand?" Duffy's distorted guitar and Matt Douglas's skronking saxophone create beauty from Segarra's warnings of disorder.
Some of the best songs on The Past is Still Alive are incredibly life-affirming. Opener "Alibi" is a plea to drug-addicted childhood friends, a promise that, "Maybe we'll start a band," on a song that introduces the swath of instrumentation present throughout the record, like gentle piano, steady drums, echoing guitar, and pedal steel. "Ogallala" and "Colossus of Roads" prioritize survival in a harsh world--Segarra compares themselves to the musicians still playing on the deck of a sinking Titanic--but not without a wish that the world itself would burn. Westerlund's crashing drums take the former to its logical conclusion, while the latter, inspired by the 2022 Club Q shooting in Colorado springs, makes the case for empathy along the way to the apocalypse. "Wrap you up in the bomb shelter of my feather bed," Segarra sings, fighting cruelty with compassion atop Phil Cook's mournful dobro and organ and Westerlund's funereal drum rolls.
It's a line in "Hourglass" that sticks with me the most among the lyrical and instrumental brilliance of The Past is Still Alive. Recounting feeling out-of-place among the status-obsessed, Segarra shifts their perspective. "Suddenly, a boulder's just sand in an hourglass," they sing. Though they spend much of the album concentrating on time and place, they recognize that our mark on earth is statistically insignificant, something we can use to our advantage rather than something that makes us feel small. What many in society consider important--celebrity, power, money--is volatile compared to the power of your own agency, of giving life to the past.
