Xenia Rubinos

New York's singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Xenia Rubinos, the daughter of a Puerto Rican woman and a Cuban man, studied jazz composition at the Berklee College of Music and created an original Afro-Latin-electronic fusion on the 12-song album Magic Trix (2013), which revealed the sophisticated range of her jazzy phrasing and her passion for arrangements influenced by prog-rock. Heavily syncopated drumming and hard-rock guitar riff prop up her purring and shrieking in Help. A grating organ joins the hiccupping drumbeat to shape the stormy torch-ballad Hair Receding. The six-minute Cherry Tree is the closest thing to a conventional song. The (bossanova-inspired) rhythm and (mellow) accompaniment of Ultima are straightforward, but here it's the vocal games that rule, a form of creative singing halfway between Jeanne Lee and Laurie Anderson. The same idea, pushed to the extreme, creates the hypnosis of Whirlwind, which even opens with a bit of musique concrete. Tamed and restrained, the same idea leads to I Like Being Alone, which relies on the most traditional (almost childish) melody. A side show focuses on Caribbean folk, repeatedly deconstructed in comic ditties like Los Mangopaunos.

Black Terry Cat (NuBlack, 2016) switched gear to a more conventional and professionally produced funk-soul style. Don't Wanna Be is her most fashionable ballad yet. However, the sophisticated, ethereal and dreamy Lonely Lover subverts the genre. Sh seems to borrow from commercials (the feverish Mexican Chef), circus music (See Them) and the nursery rhyme (Right?, which adapts her melismatic undulating vocals to the style of childrens' songs over a grating organ). Hard-rock discharges detonate Just Like I and I Won't Stay borders on jazz and rap.

Una Rosa (Anti, 2021), an album full of tributes to her Hispanic roots (both literary and musical ones), ventured further into the fashionable production methods of the time, with heavy use of synthesizers, yielding the bombastic synth-funk-pop of Working All the Time and the syncopated salsa-gospel Sacude. Her sophisticated jazz-soul phrasing shines in the mellow and sleepy What is this Voice? Here the previous album's ironic references to her tradition d/evolve into nostalgic numbers that are steeped in operatic folk hymns (Ay Hombre) and that hark back to the vocal groups of the 1950s (Cogelo Suave and Don't Put Me In Red ). There are peaks of pathos and weltanschauung in the bleak socio-cinematic vignette Darkest Hour, in the stark and Laurie Anderson-esque litany Did My Best, and in the rap-flamenco collage Who Shot Ya (with the best melodic hook). Rubinos has become a less origina voice but at the same time she has matured into a charismatic voice of Caribbean alienation.