“I’m every lung that’s breathing in this filthy city waste / I’m trick turning street walker / Mary full of grace / undocumented worker wage slave / I’m needle pierced vein / I am black rose on Grandmother’s grave,” Ceschi tells us on “Elm City Ballad,” an ode to the place he was raised and the first song released from his new album.
And then: “Love me, city, ‘till I’m gray / Elm City, love me safe / Love me ‘till I am erased.”
It’s a fitting first taste of Broken Bone Ballads, a gorgeously epic and deeply personal record that shows how far-ranging, emotionally complex, and outright beautiful the territory of hip hop can be while staying true to what’s driven it since its birth in the Bronx 40 years ago.
Except that this album isn’t about the Bronx.
It’s about Ceschi (aka Julio Ramos), his family and his upbringing. It’s about his hustle to make it as a musician, which led to him and his brother starting Fake Four, a record label that now boasts a roster of 33 artists. It’s about how his involvement in a high-profile drug bust and the time he served over it affected him, especially as the case turned out to be more complicated than it initially seemed.
Brian Slattery Photo
In a bigger way, it’s about New Haven itself, the city that built him, and the life it gave him as he walked through it as a kid and young man with his ears wide open. Which is maybe one of the reasons why his release party at Toad’s on Mar. 15, at which he performed the album front to back with an 11-piece band as an opener for the Providence-based Sage Francis, was so packed, and why Ceschi himself was overflowing with gratitude. He told a story about seeing Sage Francis years ago as a teenager at the Tune Inn.
“Now I’m playing at Toad’s, in my hometown, opening for him?” he said. “Unreal. This is like a reunion.”
Sonically, Broken Bone Ballads is a feast. Fingerpicked guitars and accordions find a place at the table with synthesizers, drum samples, drum machines, and the voices and rush of traffic that make up the sounds of the street. Some (“Forever 33”) are stripped down to their most essential, hard-hitting elements. Others (“One Hundred Dragonflies”) drown in a lush, woozy string section that draws straight from the playbook of the most unapologetically romantic ‘60s pop. All the cuts bring their disparate pieces together to make an immensely satisfying whole, more than hooky enough to snag from the second the needle drops, yet texturally interesting enough to reward repeated listens. Why don’t more bands sound this way?
Ceschi’s most obvious strength, however, is his own voice, and the brain and soul behind it. He’s a solid, honest singer and a terrific MC, with a complex rhythmic sensibility that keeps the ear flying through verses packed with lines that can stop you in your tracks, whether it’s about God (“I’ll die trying to please him”), thwarted ambition (“how you gonna prove you’re not another sucker with a dream / living under your grandpa’s roof with your brother”), or grieving for family members lost, (“violent moans like those of our father when dope left his system / we need you more than you know”), or just the streets of New Haven.
And then there’s this stanza from “Barely Alive,” the collaboration with Sage Francis that closes the album on a defiant, triumphant note.
Build us a holiday
Out of stones and holograms,
Holy relics and hummingbirds,
All to fill this hollow man.
I’m alright, I’m alright.
But don’t fuck with me tonight.
These fists are clenched and I will fight for every breath left in this life.
This is Ceschi’s tenth release, but it comes across with the blistering energy of a first record, the sound of someone who has discovered something — or maybe rediscovered it. Bursting with grit, intelligence, and heart, Broken Bone Ballads is a reminder of what music can accomplish when its creator doesn’t hold anything back.
Broken Bone Ballads is available for preorder now and has a wide release on CD, LP, and iTunes on April 7.
