Yet Another Grim, Brilliantly Lyrical, Oldtime-Flavored Album From Curtis Eller

Charismatic banjo player and bandleader Curtis Eller is yet another first-class songwriter who got brain-drained out of New York by the the real estate speculators’ blitzkrieg. But he’s never stopped writing dark, witheringly insightful, brutally funny folk noir songs. His latest album A Poison Melody – streaming at his music page – is his hardest-rocking record yet, and it’s as grimly relevant as ever.

The title track, Radiation Poison sets the stage. Don’t let the bluster of those of jump blues-inspired horns fool you: this is about an invisible killer. Eller’s references may be Nagasaki and the New Mexico atom bomb tests, but in the post-Fukushima era, the song has even more relevance. “Everybody’s been exposed,” Eller warns.

Eller introduces the dirty-water garage rock stomp of No Soap Radio as “A no-bullshit story about what happened in ’63 – how come it’s always Texas when there’s a murder on tv?” William Dawson’s vibraphone lingers in the background with the torchy harmony vocals of Dana Marks and Stacy Wolfson on the album’s title cut, a doomed soul ballad.

Jack Fleishman’s loose-limbed drums propel Union Hall, a New Orleans-spiced romp alluding to the 1968 Detroit riots, but with current-day irony:

I’m gonna call the police on my neighbor
I’m gonna take my pistol downtown
The Constitution said I can shoot what I want
Everybody get down

Nobody is surprised by the die-off in These Birds, a stark eco-disaster parable. Pay the Band, a big audience favorite at shows, has gospel piano from Tom Merrigan. As Eller sees it, money is like “morphine on the front line.” And, “You gotta pay the band if you wanna watch those losers dance.” It gets even better from there: the punchlines are too good to give away.

The gospel atmosphere is more subdued and elegaic in Lenny Bruce. Cowles plays flute over Eller’s spare, steady, ominous banjo in Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a caustically aphoristic World War II basic training parable in period-perfect blues vernacular.

After that, Eller does a diptych about a riot; the sly introduction signals the twisted jubilation of the second, a cynical reminder how calamities are always heaven for profiteers. He winds up the album with the sobering No Word to Choose, Hugh Crumley’s steady bass holding the center amid subtly tricky syncopation, up to a final conflagration. In the post-3/11, post-9/11 era, we need clear-eyed guys like Eller more than ever.

Noir-Tinged Transcendence from Thumbscrew

Thumbscrew‘s show earlier this week at what has become an annual festival at the Provincetown Playhouse on Washington Square West was more plaintive and haunting than expected. Guitarist Mary Halvorson left her pitch pedal alone for the most part until the last couple of numbers, where she went crazy with both live loops and warpy Jabba the Hut space lounge sonics. And although she did goose the audience, and maybe her bandmates too, with wry upward swipes at the end of a couple of numbers, she went for noir, and poignancy, and angst throughout most of the rest of the show.

It was almost funny to watch bassist Michael Formanek,, the group’s spokesman this time out, matter-of-factly walking a swing interlude in a tune by drummer Tomas Fujiwara. Otherwise, Formanek punched out miminalist pedalpoint, the occasional looming chord and plenty of somber, bowed phrases, often echoing Halvorson’s lingering, chilly, reverbtoned resonance. His comedic moment was a Sisyphian series of climbs, moving further and further up the scale with a predictable but irresistible tumble at the end.

Fujiwara was his typical counterintuitive self: trios tend to have busy drums, but not this unit. He opened and closed the set with tricky, peek-a-boo polyrhythms, driving the music forward against the beat. Beyond one relatively brief, stampeding cascade toward the end of the set, he kept his cymbals flickering,  with a subtle, lithe attack on the snare and toms.

The trio opened with Snarling Joys, a Halvorson tune, the guitarist foredshadowing the gloom ahead via a pointilllistic series of icepick riffs. Many of the set’s numbers bore a close resemblance to Big Lazy at their most haunting, and exploratory, notably Formanek’s bitterly aching Cruel Heartless Bastards, a take of Jimmy Rowles’ moody classic The Peacocks and Julio De Caro’s Buen Amigo, a tango from the band’s most recent all-covers album, Theirs. The companion album, Ours – all originals, naturally- was also well represented, particularly with a strutting but wounded reinvention of Herbie Nichols’ House Party Starting which turned out to be a lot more of a lament than a dancefloor hit. Other material was less harrowing: a tricky, serpentine take of Fujiwara’s Saturn Way; an even more rhythmically maddening yet supertight song that sounded like 70s British rock band Wire spun through a cuisinart; and the closing tune, Things That Rhyme with Spangle (that’s a very short version of the official song title), which Halvorson bent and twisted, finally hitting her distortion pedal for some roaring punk chords.

The series of free concerts at the Provincetown Playhouse continues into next week, resuming Monday, July 22 at 7 PM when Rolling Stones multi-saxophonist Tim Ries leads his band. Get there early, i.e. by 6:45 if you want to get in.

Slashing Blues and Klezmer and Noir Sounds with Book of J at Barbes This Month

Saturday evening at Barbes, it was an awful lot of fun to witness the contrast in styles between guitarists Jeremiah Lockwood and Steve Ulrich. Lockwood, who’s one-half of Book of J and also leads the Sway Machinery, is a live wire, tremolo-picking sharply feathery flurries, plucking out jaggedly incisive phrases and plaintive blues licks on his vintage National Steel model. Ulrich, the film composer and Big Lazy leader was a predator waiting for his prey, cool and calm and distantly resonant, then in a flash going in for the kill with his Les Paul.

He was the special guest at Book of J’s weekly 6 PM Saturday residency at Barbes this month, which is no surprise considering that he and Lockwood have been conjuring up plenty of sinisterly spiky sounds in an on-and-off collaboration that dates back to the early zeros. Rocking a classic punk rock mohawk, Book of J frontwoman Jewlia Eisenberg joined them for one of several lesbian Jewish ballads – “There’s lots of them,” she grinned, singing with triumph and passion over Lockwood’s gritty, chromatically-fueled chords and Ulrich’s signature, lingering noir accents.

Classic Barbes moment. There aren’t many venues left in New York where you can see this kind of cross-pollination creating deliciously new musical hybrids, even if they only last for a few minutes.

The rest of the set was just as diverse. Watching Ulrich play spare, purposeful, purist oldschool Chicago blues was an unexpected treat; then again, the guy can play pretty much anything. Likewise, Lockwood moved methodically from hypnotically emphatic, Malian-inspired phrasing to a ripsnorting cadenza or three and gentle, poignant jangle. The two guitarists went into allusive noir with Mood Indigo, then took another stab at the Ellington catalog, edging their way into a take of Caravan that was more of a slow, wary procession through the desert, keeping an eye out for US drones and Soviet warplanes. Their version of an uneasy Big Lazy big-sky theme had the same menace just over the horizon.

Eisenberg and Lockwood’s most riveting number together was a gorgeous klezmer tune in the Middle Eastern freygish mode, written by a famous Argentine singer and member of what was for a long time the largest Yiddish-speaking community outside of Europe and later, Israel. Lockwood introduced a slower, more allusively rapturous number as being written by an early 20th century cantor who’d chosen his daughter as his successor. That move didn’t go over with the synagogue elders, so the cantor quit. “When somebody dies, where do you say kaddish?” a friend once asked the guy. “In my garden,” he replied.

Book of J return to Barbes tomorrow night, July 20 at 6 with special guest Brian Chase on drums, playing from a new song cycle based on the work of Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin. Big Lazy are back at Barbes as well on July 26 at 10; Singer/guitarist Pierre de Gaillande’s edgy parlor pop band Bad Reputation – who continue to build a rich catalog of English translations of songs by badass 1940s-70s French songwriter Georges Brassens – open the night at 8.

Brent Arnold and Aditya Kalyanpur Create an Entertaining, High-Energy Repertoire for Cello and Tabla at the Rubin Museum

Last night at their sold-out show at the Rubin Museum of Art, Brent Arnold and Aditya Kalyanpur had about as much fun as a cellist and a tabla player can rustle up in about an hour and a half onstage. The music definitely wasn’t classical, and there were only a couple of numbers in their energetic yet frequently hypnotic set that sounded remotely Indian.

One of those interludes was a tabla solo. Early in the set, Kalyanpur built frenetic volleys of sixteenth notes and hung with those perfectly articulated beats, making it easy while seemingly waiting for a sign from Arnold to chill. Arnold didn’t give him one. How long was Kalyanpur going to be able to keep this up? Probably indefinitely, at the rate he was going.

Later on, completely deadpan, he moved from a similarly rapidfire thicket of beats to a wryly muted, bubbly, low-register brook, then had goofy fun with slowly oscillating notes that became a booming, strutting, cartoonish portrait of somebody who takes himself way, way too seriously. It got the most applause of the night.

Arnold may be best known for his loopmusic, but there were inumerable passages during the show where he could have stashed away several long, circular patterns in his pedal and then just let them play back. But he didn’t. Witnessing him articulate them live, with subtle variations in attack and tone, was a rare treat in this style of music.

Arnold plucks as much, maybe more than he bows: essentially, this was a drum-n-bass set. The duo made quasi trip-hop out of a famous Thelonious Monk chorus, but without the usual loopy CHUNK, ka-chunk. Arnold’s opening tune, and one of the later ones as well, had a rustic, often wistful Adirondack folk freshness. A couple of slower numbers could have been Palestinian dirges…without the chromatics and microtones. Other than a clever, enigmatic detour into the whole-note scale, and swaths of sustained chords keening with microtones, Arnold stuck wit traditional western tonalities.

The night’s most epic, shapeshifting number seemed to conjure up fishing for increasingly larger and more dangerous prey. Other tunes either alluded to or distantly brought to mind hard funk, and Tunisian rai music, and occasionally the more playful side of two other cellists with a thing for loops, Julia Kent and Maya Beiser. But Arnold is more aggressively rhythmic and less brooding – and has created his own instantly recognizable, entertaining sound.

The Rubin Museum of Art is home to lots of music throughout the year, both in the comfortable basement-level auditorium and throughout the building (the Brooklyn Raga Massive held their annual all-night raga marathon here for a few years). This Sunday, July 21 the museum has free admission all day, with activities for kids plus performances by a Nepalese hip-hop collective and a thunderous all-female Brazilian samba reggae drum corps.

Greg Lewis’ Organ Monk: A Completely Different, High-Voltage Beast

Organist Greg Lewis opened his set at the Provincetown Playhouse a couple of weeks ago with a mighty, sustained swell of tritones that grew more and more menacing as the sound swirled and smoked through his Leslie speaker. Then he launched into his first Thelonious Monk number of the night. In over an hour onstage, he took the crowd on a roller-coaster of whirlwind riffs, purist blues, phantasmagorial chromatics, a dip into gritty noir, then up and out with a torrential take of Monk’s Four in One.

Lewis calls this project Organ Monk – and was giving away free t-shirts to spread the gospel of Monk on the organ, a “completely different beast” compared to the man in the hat’s piano originals. It’s amazing how much color and orchestral vastness Lewis gets out of his righthand, considering that he doesn’t use the pedals much, tirelessly walking the bass with his left, constantly working the drawbars for subtle shifts in tone and timbre. Monk on the piano can be creepy – Monk on Lewis’ B3 is terrifying.

Yet for all the pyrotechnics, the best song of the night might have been Lewis’ own, slow, simmering, somber, subtly latin-tinged original, dedicated to his nephew. Then he picked up the pace with a handful of tunes from his latest album, American Standards a collection of reharmonized Broadway and cabaret tunes that Monk liked to play Guitarist Ron Jackson was every bit as ferocious as Lewis was, capping off several solos with machete volleys of tremolo-picked chords and taking the intensity up even further with his circing, lightning arpeggios and clustering riffs. And who would have expected icy ghoulabilly chicken-scratch, or wide swaths of octaves that were closer to Indian raga riffs than Wes Montgomery? Behind them, their drummer used his hardware for playful accents when he wasn’t swinging the funk with an agile understatement.

The concert series’ organizer, alto saxophonist Dave Pietro added some high-voltage, Coltrane-ish flurries and stormy torrents on a couple of tune as well. It was a change from the lyrical. Ravel-influenced tunefulness he’d played at the festival’s opening concert the previous week, leading a great band with Gary Versace on piano, Alex Sipiagin on trumpet, Johannes Weidenmueller on bass and Rudy Royston on drums.

Lewis continues to maintain a punishing gig schedule all over town; he and another first-rate guitarist, Marvin Sewell are at Bar Lunatico for brunch on July 21 at 1 PM. This year’s summer series of admission-free jazz concerts at the Provincetown Playhouse on Washington Square West continues on July 22 at 7 PM with Rolling Stones sax player Tim Ries and his band.

Breathtaking Grandeur and a Feast of Guitars on Noctorum’s Latest Brilliant Album

Marty Willson-Piper is best known as this era’s greatest twelve-string guitarist, but he’s also a brilliant songwriter, an aspect that was often weirdly overlooked during his long tenure alongside another great tunesmith, Steve Kilbey, in iconic Australian psychedelic band the Church. Willson-Piper has also put out several great albums under his own name and with Noctorum, his project with Dare Mason. Noctorum‘s richly orchestral, mesmerizingly jangly latest album, Afterlife, is streaming at Bandcamp.

It opens with The Moon Drips, a slinky, seductive, bolero-tinged ballad: imagine Nick Cave at his lushest, with a brass section. The carnivalesque, hurdy-gurdy style bridge is delicious.

High Tide, Low Tide is a mighty, jangly, propulsive rocker that would have been a standout track on a late 80s Church album. Mason sings this cautionary tale to a high-flying party animal who’s heading for a fall.

Willson-Piper returns to lead vocals for the album’s first single, Piccadilly Circus, a bleakly gorgeous, syncopatedly swaying portrait of quiet working class desperation in real estate bubble-era London. A lusciously icy blend of six and six-string guitars anchor Show, a grimly metaphorical breakup narrative set to vamping, Television-like janglerock. Willson-Piper’s incisive, climbing bass punctuates the lush, dreamy, pulsing sonics and baroque elegance of A Resurrected Man.

The album’s loudest track is A Girl with No Love: choogling, raging 70s riff-rock verse, lushly jangly chorus. “I don’t know if I’ll ever dream again, all I know is I can,” Willson-Piper croons in Trick, a surreal blend of Iggy Pop and the Cocteau Twins. Head On (not the Stooges classic but a duet between Willson-Piper and his violinist wife Olivia) rises out of incisively rhythmic riffage to a sultry, sinister peak and eventually an outro straight out of Jethro Tull: “See you at nine-ish where we first met, me and my Sunbeam, you and your Corvette.”

The album’s title track is its most amorphous number, Willson-Piper’s narrator waiting in the netherworld for loved ones amid the guitar swirl. The final cut is the unexpectedl whimsical, bouncy In a Field Full of Sheep. Good to see these guys, with careers that go back to the early 80s, still going strong.

Transcendence and Turbulence with the Vijay Iyer Sextet at the Vanguard

Pianist Vijay Iyer and his sextet’s sold-out opening set of a weeklong stand at the Vanguard last night was an energetic yet saturnine suite – or a darkly glimmering jazz sonata. Iyer is not an ostentatious pianist: he makes his point, has some fun and then gets out, just like Thelonious Monk and Ellington before him would do. It’s a little early to enshrine Iyer alongside those two, but the esthetic is the same. His band provided alternately blustery and plaintive intensity throughout well over an hour and a half onstage. He’s back at the Vanguard tonight, July 17 through the 21st, with sets at 8:30 and around 10; cover is $35.

Other than band introductions, Iyer barely spoke to the audience, beyond asserting that he and the band stand against Trump’s bigotry and white supremacy, encouraging the crowd to keep fighting, since “The fight is far from over.” That’s the title of Iyer’s album with this crew, and he reminded everybody that it’s just as true today as when he released it back in 2017.

His gritty, sometimes grim modal focus contrasted with the turbulence of the horns. Tenor player Mark Shim began and ended the night crossing simmering, smoky terrain; in between, he soared and spiraled and chuffed in tandem with drummer Jeremy Dutton, the group’s junior member. A constantly recurring trope, the pairings of individual horns with  the full rhythm section, contrasted with Iyer’s relentlessness, sharply focused rhythm and hard-edged, often distantly latin-inflected melodicism.

Alto saxophonist Steve Lehman built increasingly complex layers of hardbop, bouncing and even pogoing in place while Dutton distingushed himself as a connoisseur of New Orleans funk grooves. Graham Haynes played mournful wide-angle flugelhorn, switching to cornet for his more kinetic moments. Bassist Stephan Crump pulsed in tandem with Iyer, or, in one of the night’s most rapturous interludes, bowed sepulchral midrange wisps against the bandleader’s eerie belltone variations.

It was a night of innumerable transcendent moments, immersed in the sobering context of the here and now, where we have a bridge-and-tunnel ranter in the Oval Office whose hysterical antics only obscure the ongoing unraveling of the Constitution. The most rapturous of those musical moments was when Iyer worked extreme lows against extreme highs while Haynes built a shivery, Twin Peaks microtonal interlude on his flugelhorn. Likewise, Iyer’s clever shifts from refusenik low-register pedalpoint to increasingly tense, stabbing close harmonies while the horns blew clouds of steam. Every number segued into an other, Iyer seamlessly bridging the chasms between hard-swinging funk and distantly sinister majesty. As the pianist intimated, there’s no telling where the next set is going to go: they’re all different. And yet, they’ll all have singalong (or at least humalong) tunefulness balancing a persistent unease. No wonder the guy’s so popular.

Another Vivid, Lyrical, Understatedly Haunting Album From Sharon Goldman

Sharon Goldman is one of the most gently powerful songwriters to emerge from the incredibly fertile East Village rock scene of the late 90s and early zeros. The real estate speculators’ blitzkrieg crushed it, but Goldman managed to keep her career going on the road. Since then, she’s put out a handful of brilliant albums of catchy, purposeful parlor pop and acoustic rock with sharp, plainspoken lyrics that often allude to much darker themes than her bright tunesmithing would lead you to think she’d tackle. Her latest album Every Trip Around the Sun – streaming at her music page – is in a way just as daring and iconoclastic as her previous record, Kol Isha, a sobering look at a very conflicted Jewish upbringing. This one focuses on issues of aging and death…from a distance, set to catchy chord changes and soaring choruses. Leonard Cohen may have gone to the tower of song, but Sharon Goldman is here for anybody who misses him.

Dolly Parton would no doubt be proud to have written the opening track, A Garden, a sprightly bluegrass-pop tune but also a memento mori: it’s a female counterpart to Mark Sinnis’ Undertaker in My Rearview Mirror. Goldman sang an absolutely shattering version of the understatedly towering title track at Rockwood Music Hall back in May; those bittersweet chord changes underscored both the triumph and bleakness of looking back rather than forward.

In betweem. the rest of the album is characteristically rich. The core of the band here is Allison Tartalia on keys, Craig Akin on bass, Mark Dann on electric guitar, and Eric Puente on drums, with contributions from several members of Goldman’s inner circle (if you remember the irrepressible and sublimely talented early zeros songwriters collective Chicks with Dip, you’ll recognize a lot of these folks).

The End of Sunset Over Athens puts a sobering, historically-informed spin on an otherwise sunny vacation narrative. Migration, the album’s most overtly political number, is an even more troubling look at the worldwide refugee crisis. Sara Milonovich’s violin and Noah Hoffeld’s cello provide a stark backdrop for the loaded metaphors of Lone Black Crow.

One of the album’s most offhandedly chilling numbers, Am I There Yet ponders the possibility that there may be no “there” to get to. Goldman plays both guitar and piano on the brooding Sunset at the Border, a haunting yet hopeful narrative that makes the connection between the South American refugee crisis, the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the Berlin Wall.

She weighs the angst of a gradeschooler with the angst of middle age in When I Was Ten, then paints an allusively gripping portrait of the morning of 9/11 in Tuesday Morning Sun. Penny With the Waves is wistful elegy for a lost friend, while The Ballerina may be the most ferociously feminist song Goldman has ever written, a savagely metaphorital slap upside the head of the patriarchy. Goldman also proves to be a brilliant rockabilly singer – who knew? – on The Collector, a tongue-in-cheek assessment of people accumulating…um…stuff. One suspects there will be even more unexpected revelations and fearlessly relevant work from this restless songwriter in the years to come.

A Dark, Jangly Americana Masterpiece From Russ Tolman

Back in the 80s Russ Tolman led the psychedelic Americana band True West, who were best known for their feral twin-Telecaster duels. He put out three albums with them, if you count the first ep and the posthumous outtakes-and-demos collection. The second one, Drifters is one of the fifty best rock records ever made, a jangling, clanging, surrealistically haunting masterpiece. But all the guitar savagery wouldn’t have counted for much if Tolman wasn’t such a slashing tunesmith and evocative lyricist. Since then he’s made a name for himself as a connoisseur of western noir, a sort of slightly less prolific Steve Wynn (his bandmate in the legendary/obscure Suspects, Wynn’s pre-Dream Syndicate college group).

Tolman’s latest album, Goodbye El Dorado – streaming at Spotify – is a mellower, more carefully crafted take on the True West sound, a masterful intertwine of acoustic and electric guitars along with mandolin, electric piano and a swinging rhythm section. He’s never written more vividly or with more allusive grimness. It’s a historically-infused song cycle about how people are drawn to California, only to see their dreams dashed. As a native Californian, Tolman has the inside track.

With its border-rock accordion, the album’s first song, Los Angeles, is typical in the sense that Tolman never lets on to what happens to the woman at the center of the story. He doesn’t usually hit anything head-on: he takes you down to the crossroads and lets you wait for the devil, alone.

The album’s best cut is Kid, a searingly spot-on account of a girl from a broken home whose teachers think that she “might be talented at art,” but her refrain is “Please don’t make me go home.” The janglerock backdrop, with Kirk Swan’s incisive terse guitar fills and Robert Lloyd’s mandolin, is a little more gentle and sparkly than True West typically was, but it’s obviously the same writer here.

The 6/8 ballad North Hollywood Dream traces the story of an Idaho kid who lands in LA, only to watch his hopes drift slowly away. In 405, over an inteweave of guitars and Rhodes piano – that’s the bandleader with Swan and Lloyd – Tolman paints a wryly knowing picture of LA freeway hell. The album’s title track is a shuffling Bakersfield country tune with mariachi horns: “Goodbye El Dorado, you’ve been a good companion, I’ve been a dutiful son,” the narrator muses as he heads out for good.

Yuba City – as in, “I’m going down to Yuba City, if I’m going down at all” – is another escape anthem with a bizarre mix of tinkling saloon piano, soaring pedal steel and string synth, with a tantalizingly gorgeous guitar solo in the middle. Moody brass, Kevin Jarvis’ ominous drumbeats and ex-Dream Syndicateer Dave Provost’s supple bass groove permeate the bolero ambience of California Winter, a wrenchingly heartbroken narrative: “In the merry month of November I turned my thoughts to the dead,” Tolman intones. The funereal outro, with its exchange of riffs between the horns, reverb guitar and organ is as good as anything True West ever recorded.

Do You Like the Way is a ruthlessly hilarious yet sympathetic portrait of a guy who doesn’t know when to stop: “You’re a free spirit, or at least you like to drink them.” Tolman raises the sarcasm factor several notches with the country ballad Almost Heaven, a twistedly cynical California wildfire scenario. He stays on the country tip for the album’s most epic number, Take It Easy Take It Slow, spiced with sparse twelve-string guitar and pedal steel.

“Knew it was the border from the giant ‘Need weed’ sign/And the liquor stores in the rearview mirror on the California side,” Tolman explains in the caustically funny coastal roadtrip tale Pacific Rain. Honkytonk piano mingles with a famous Stones guitar riff and  swooshy organ in Satellite Bar, a celestial place with dollar beer night once a month, free popcorn…and a dogwater bowl by the door. Tolman brings the record full circle with the grimly jangly Time Flies, a folksy, aphoristic take on the perils of getting older but not wiser. Good to see a revered cult figure – not the Jim Jones kind – still at the top of his game.

Grupo Fantasma Bandleader Adrian Quesada Headines a Cutting-Edge Soul Triplebill at Lincoln Center Out of Doors

More about that oldschool and newschool soul triplebill at Lincoln Center Out of Doors on the 27th of this month: at 7 PM, British band the Black Pumas open the night, followed by late 60s singer-survivor Lee Fields & the Expressions. Headlining at around 9 are psychedelic guitar maven Adrian Quesada. leading a Texas soul band with a rotating cast of singers from his home state.

As the leader of Grupo Fantasma and its many, many spinoffs, Quesada is no stranger to fans of psychedelic and latin music. His main band’s latest album, American Music Vol. 17 is streaming at Spotify. It’s the group’s most political album, and one of their best, right from the ominous flurry of guitars that opens the first track Fugitivo, a cantering norteno desert rock number with spaghetti western riffage, lithe accordion and a grim narrative about being on the run, from La Migra, or more than one enemy.

Nubes is a sly, brassy mashup of psychedelic cumbia and salsa, while LT, a sex joint, has bright horn accents over a slinky, oscillating soul groove. The band go back to cumbia for the aching, bolero-tinged ballad Que Mas Quieres De Mi, then shift to a mashup of lowrider funk amd reggaeton in The Wall, a snide dismissal of Trumpie anti-immigrant bigotry.

La Cruda is a brightly bouncy, oldtime Mexican folk-flavored party anthem, followed by the gritty, anthemic, fuzztoned Nosotros, set to a circling beat that’s practically qawwali. The brand come across as a latin soul Rare Earth in Let Me Be, a defiant individualist’s anthem fueled by organ and guitar.

The group sandwich a brief dubwise interlude amid circling, dancing psychedelic chamame in Ausencia. They kick off the album’s most epic track, Hot Sauce with a trickily rhythmic intro and then hit a mighty, horn-driven cumbia sway, Quesada contributing his most incisive guitar work here.

Cuidado is hard-swinging wah funk tune with a growly baritone sax solo. The album’s best and most broodingly trippy number is Yo Quisiera, Quesada’s bittersweet wah guitar over moody organ chords; then the band make psychedelic salsa out of it. They close with the darkly otherworldly oldschool Colombian-style cumbia Sombra Roja, flute and accordion swirling over icy reverb guitar. There are as many flavors here as you could possibly find on both sides of the Tex-Mex border. Now imagine if this music, or this band possibly could have existed if there was a wall there.