In Juan Gómez Bárcena’s 2023 novel Now not Even the Lifeless, a former conquistador accepts a mysterious quest from the colonial executive of Mexico. He should go away his spouse and residential, but it surely’s going to be value it—the activity will pay gold, and it will have to most effective take two weeks. Off he is going, driving horseback into a lot of trials and tribulations, the entire whilst 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 now not most effective driving, he’s time touring—advancing by way of a long time after which centuries, tripping and stumbling into long term worlds the place the legends and prejudices of the previous frequently tackle new shapes. Sooner or later he’s reincarnated as a migrant employee, hitching a experience on a educate.
“Time can take you for a experience,” Alynda Segarra sings close to the highest in their 9th album, The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive. Relatively than horses, Segarra most commonly writes about trains, as a result of they used to hop a couple of themself and as a result of the way in which the educate, the primary rhythm of rural industrialization, runs underneath the American blues and people track that tell their occupation as Hurray for the Riff Raff. That’s the shaky-steady ahead momentum using The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive: phase folk-punk memoir, phase harm-reduction PSA, phase non secular invocation and/or world-historical séance. The site is: In the market someplace and the time is: Don’t all time is attached?
The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive represents a flip again towards extra historically Americana textures after 2022’s Existence on Earth, one of those digital rewilding challenge 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 revel in and, lurking within the background, violence, fentanyl, and barrels of crude. Manufacturer Brad Cook dinner performs bass right here, along side a core studio lineup together with brother Phil Cook dinner (piano, organ, Wurltizer, dobro) and drummer Yan Westerlund—what one would possibly name the alternate-reality Megafaun, that includes two unique member-brothers and the 1/3 member’s brother (behold, the ever-reaching affect of DeYarmond Edison).
Parts from Segarra’s biography seem in flashes during their discography however hardly ever as explicitly as in The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive, a vibrant time travelogue that displays on Segarra’s younger misadventures as a “grimy child” or punk traveler with humility, nostalgia, and transhistorical point of view. Within the retelling, shoplifting and dumpster diving for meals constitute each self-sufficiency and secret disgrace. And when you haven’t any position to move, a educate will take you someplace. It’s definitely now not the way of living for everybody: “Right here’s a silver spoon, you’ll devour your center out as a prize,” Segarra scoffs, or cautions, on spotlight “Hawkmoon,” a rollicking coming-of-age tale honoring a trans mentor, Pass over Jonathan, who’s assaulted and not observed once more.
