The Red and Black

Issue date: 3/5/09 Section: Out & About

Media Credit: Courtesy amiestreet.com Hurray for the Riff Raff will be playing with Dark Dark Dark and Sea of Dogs (featuring Emily Armond of Dark Meat) tonight. [Click to enlarge]

Alynda Lee learned how to play banjo by spending over a year train hopping with crust punks, exploring the Great American West and playing free shows in the band The Dead Man Street Orchestra whenever and wherever there were ears and attention spans.

"It's hard to focus on a project when you're always transient," Lee said. Her current focus centers on her singing and banjo work for New Orleans-based collective Hurray for the Riff Raff.

With banjo, double bass, fiddle, accordion, toy piano and the singing saw, HRR's gypsy-folk wanders in a listless funeral dirge stomp.

"Shae [Freeman] invented this instrument called an 'ocean harp' which is a metal bowl covered all around, filled with water, with pipes melded to it. It sounds like a whale singing," Lee said.


The ocean harp's ghostly wail calls to mind the eerie siren of a Theremin, thickening the moody texture of its lush compositions.

Out of scrapwork, HRR crafts a ramshackle sound with Lee's vocal work nearly collapsing with its plaintive delicacy.

HRR's vaudevillian melancholia is countered by its spicy, Creole twang, sometimes citing Will Oldham and Beach House. Lee's lovelorn lyricism has a lonesome center-of-gravity that devastates.

Since its beginning in 2007, HRR has been putting on DIY shows at the most unlikely of places. According to its Myspace, "If you have a barn, we're there."

"We went to Europe and played in a French squat basement, in various downtowns across America and at a kid's birthday party," Lee said.

"My favorite show was probably at 'Idapalooza Fruit Jam' in Tennessee. It's this queer sanctuary and music festival held every summer. We played in this barn with amazing acoustics," Lee said.

Lee hopes to "test out some new songs and tighten up for our impending South By Southwest debut" during the band's performance tonight.

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