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I’ve been writing about New Mexican singer/songwriters going on 15 years now, and I can tell you there’s no end of them in this place, and good ones, too, from all over the musical spectrum. In recent weeks, I’ve made the acquaintance of Lara Manzanares, whose terrific album Land Baby won Best Of at the 2018 NM Music Awards, and the soulful Isaac Aragon, who’s forthcoming single, scheduled for early 2019, is going to open up some ears. Meanwhile, two guys whose work I’ve enjoyed for a while, Gato Malo (aka Felix Peralta) and Julian Wild (aka Julian Singer-Corbin), frontman for Wild Humans, have recently released new work worthy of your ears. The two albums come at you from completely different musical points of the compass, but what they share is deep insight delivered with honest feeling.

Gato Malo
Back to the City (indie)
A review
Felix Peralta (aka Gato Malo), the South Valley troubadour, has taken a new direction with Back to the City. Known for his hard-driving party tunes, excoriating blues, jumping zydeco, a stinging lime-green electric guitar, and a penchant for exploring the dark side of human nature, Peralta has softened his sound and headed into acoustic Southwest Americana territory. That alteration has taken the tenderness that often hid in the shadows of his songs and moved it out into the light. Songs that might have been fueled by anger and despair in the past ride now on a truce that Peralta has made with his demons. They’re still present—as in the noir “No More Vodka,” which is reprised from the Gato Malo album—but they aren’t running the show. Humor threads through the album—even on a song such as “Hanging’ with Depression,” whose intense lyrics are floated on a lighthearted melody and delivered with a wink of self-awareness: “If it wasn’t for depression, I’d have nothing left to blame.” Peralta has a gift for offhand poetry, for everyday images with an unexpected heft. “The weather’s been harsh, and my bones are feeling the pain / All my garden needs is a little rain” opens the title track, about the loss of a lover who’s gone back to L.A., and perfectly captures the ache. On the Western swing number “Train I Ride,” Peralta packs a diorama of New Mexico into four-and-a-half minutes (“Like the sun, but we need more rain”). Whatever the challenges—a lost lover, loneliness, the road, thoughts of murder, a fondness for the bottle—the album keeps moving with gentle determination toward the light, as in “Set Me Free,” whose mantra is “Keep on moving, keep on moving along.” Peralta delivers his vocals without embellishment, a man sharing his thoughts in a moment of unguarded reflection—no posturing required. Check out the near-spoken vocal on “Cell Block 4,” which drops the listener into the heart of a contrite prisoner’s dream of freedom, and the gentle croon on the love song “Know My Name.” Peralta has picked a fine group of musicians to back him, and they furnish his songs nicely: Dave Devlin (mandolin, pedal steel, lap steel), Karina Wilson (fiddle), David Gomez Barclay (button accordion), Johnny Alston (Native flute), Ezra Bussman (mandolin), Chessa Peak (backup vocals), and Laura Leach Devlin (standup bass). With their help, Peralta has delivered an album that’s as warming as a bowl of green chile stew on a cold day.

Wild Humans
Wild Humans (indie)
A review
Listening to this lush, moody, introspective album, you may feel that you are standing in the heart of frontman and songwriter Julian Wild, his thoughts and feelings hanging like artwork on the walls and irresistibly activating identical thoughts and feelings in your own heart. The intensely personal, carefully crafted songs come out of the singer/songwriter tradition, and the restrained arrangements—colored by rock and jazz palettes—offer plenty of resonant space. Wild’s deft use of musical textures—the perfectly placed electric guitar lick, the reverberant banjo, the plangent clarinet—deepens the mood, but it’s his own vocal instrument, an expressive, resonant baritone, that carries the weight of the album and delivers the goods. The opener, “New Orleans Rain,” explores memory and the longing for resolution and opens the path for a succession of songs that, for the most part, deliver an unflinching self-assessment, touching on addiction, depression, and love lost. All of it is shot through with bursts of redeeming insight, as in “Hard to Believe”: “Well life is so extraordinary; / It’s full of many things you’d have to see before you could believe. / But you know just as well as me: / There are just as many things you’d have to believe before you could see.” Moody it is, but the album finds reason to hold onto hope. Even the lugubrious “Shades” brightens with an upbeat sax-filled transition that centers on this prayer: “Patience don’t leave me and grace please receive my mistake / Time fly to heal me and friends hold my heart when it aches.” The final track, “Stranger to the Storm”—with its peculiar combination of gospel and Gilbert and Sullivan—offers an explicit declaration of recovery from love’s wounds. There are unabashed love songs, too—“Muscle Memory” and “Prayer for My Lady”—and in the latter, you have to give Wild a tip of the hat for cleverly transforming “muse” into a transitive verb: “And she moves me, and she muses me, amen.” Wild Humans includes the core quartet of Wild (vocals, guitar, banjo), April Lisette (vocals—and her backup vocals are especially nice), Ryan Jarvis (drums, percussion, mandolin), and Maren Hatch (upright bass), and they are joined by Lee Taylor (tenor sax, clarinet), Robb Janov (electric violin), and Geoff St. John (keyboards, piano). Together, they’ve created an honest and memorable work of art, and a few earworms, too.

The album will be released digitally on New Year’s Eve on the usual outlets (Apple Music, Amazon, etc.). Wild will be in town over the holidays and making several appearances. Two currently confirmed are at the Tractor Brewing Wells Park Taproom, 1800 Fourth St. NW, on 12/29/18 from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. and at the Launchpad, 618 Central Ave. SW, on New Year’s Eve at about 9:00 p.m., with April Lisette. They’ll have USB drives of the album, decorated with original art, for sale on New Year’s Eve.

On a personal note, this is posting number 200 on Musically Speaking. Thank you for reading. I’m looking forward to the next 200. —Mel