The Last Days Of Oakland

"Blues with a punk attitude" is the tagline on Fantastic Negrito's website, and it's not an empty slogan. The Bay Area singer-songwriter, a.k.a. Xavier Dphrepaulezz, infuses Last Days Of Oakland with slide guitar drenched in overdrive, not to mention a hard-bitten perspective on life, love, art, commerce, class and society. It's an outlook he's earned. Before winning NPR's Tiny Desk Contest in 2015, he'd spent years in painful physical therapy, struggling to regain the use of his body following a car accident in 2000 that left him in a coma for weeks. Appropriately, Last Days Of Oakland is among the rawest pieces of music — sonically and emotionally — you'll hear all year. But it's also the work of a craftsman, full of subtlety and sophistication, along with the kind of scars that only a survivor can flaunt.