Xenia Rubinos' vivid debut album, Magic Trix, drew from noise, punk, and soul, yet it was often described as “Latin music” on account of the Brooklyn songwriter's Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage. “I think that my culture plays into that because it's part of who I am,” she's said, “but I also don't think it's the totality of my work.” But for the follow-up, her newfound appreciation of hip-hop, rediscovering Erykah Badu, and creating against a backdrop of racist police brutality prompted Rubinos to consider the parameters of her identity. “You know where to put the brown girl when she's fuckin' it up,” she chants amid the gnashing synths of “See Them.” “Where you gonna put the brown girl now she's tearin' it up?”
Black Terry Cat is all about breaking beyond limitations. From mostly keys, drums, and bass, Rubinos and her small cohort bring a funky fluidity to the bright splatters of her debut, and forge a level of inventiveness comparable to Esperanza Spalding's recent epic, Emily's D+Evolution. On a day where nothing's going right, the bass and vocals on “Lonely Lover” spiral downwards, an elegant, defeated groove into the abyss. On songs like “Laugh Clown” and “Don't Wanna Be,” Rubinos is a brooding neo-soul singer, yet “Just Like I” is an exuberant but abrasive thrash (“with the same teeth, I smile, I bite you...”) that could be by Shellac if not for her loopy vocal trill.
Rubinos' magical voice gives each of these songs their own distinctive character and magnetism. Tonally, she's a little like St. Vincent's Annie Clark, with the smoky, inviting warmth of fine red wine, and is as adept at punk confrontation as R&B run-ons. Flickers of desperation color her soulful turn on “Don't Wanna Be,” about trying to get someone to love her, while she hops between consonants on the free-associating “I Won't Say,” which stalls on the piercing tone of an ECG flatline as she recites an extract from Abbey Lincoln's 1966 essay, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?”: “Whose hair is compulsively fried, whose skin is bleached, whose nose is ‘too big,’ whose mouth is too loud, whose butt is too broad, whose feet are too flat, whose face is too black?”
On Black Terry Cat, Rubinos poses more of her own provocative questions about how black and brown bodies are contained and valued. And none more so than on the incendiary “Mexican Chef,” a spiky skit about the discreet labor performed by the people of color that “raised America in place of its mom.” Rubinos counts the Latino employees in the back of New York's every restaurant, and the workers absolving others of undesirable jobs, assuring their comfort and assuaging their guilt. “Brown cleans your house, brown takes the trash, brown even wipes your grandaddy's ass,” she raps in a springy cadence, before delivering an even harder blow about the thanks they get for it. “Brown breaks his back, brown takes the flack, brown gets cut 'cos his papers are whack/Brown sits down, brown does frown, brown's up in a hospital gown/Brown has not, brown gets shot, brown got what he deserved 'cos he fought.” With its sharp percussion and infectious polemic, it's like M.I.A. signed to Daptone, which is to say that it's a total KO.
Whereas Magic Trix was heavy with playful imagery, Rubinos gets deep inside her psyche on Black Terry Cat, as she negotiates a world that has prescribed ideas about how she should be, and questions her place outside of it. She rejects the hand that feeds and stabs on “Just Like I,” elasticizing her frustration as she details her dutiful adherence to the system. (“Every single day, living in the places you built for me.”) “How Strange It Is” is an outsider's take on life's arbitrary dividing lines, from time to borders, its curious French cabaret dissolving into nonsense. Amid the overdriven organs of “Right?”, she shoots down someone who shows her “all the things I'll never be,” and on the plainly gorgeous “Laugh Clown,” the mellow haze evoking classic Badu, Rubinos asks, “Ain't got no money, got no job/Got no kids, no country to live in: Who am I?”
But listeners of Black Terry Cat will have no doubt: Rubinos is a unique presence, with a sharp ability to make pressing issues about identity and society into funky, exhilarating music. (The record's only real downsides are a few too many instrumental interludes.) On “See Them,” she rails, “Who are they to come tell me where I'm from and what is wrong?/We know you made up stories page by page, why you lie?” Drawing from so many musical diasporas and questioning the way that different existences intersect, Rubinos' second album is American music with a different story to tell.
