This nostalgia-laced spoken-word album comes from a one-man “choir” by the name of Harvey Katz. But don’t mistake him for that shy and dweeby kid from your Hebrew-school class, because this nice Jewish boy is a transgender powerhouse who can bust some serious Semitic rhymes.

The Georgia-based Katz, who has toured with folks from Ani DiFranco to Michelle Tea, is definitely best seen live. But his new CD, his fifth, does a fine job of capturing the Choir’s unique energy—a potent mix of don’t-fuck-with-me fierceness, humor, poignant emotion and seamless ’80s references, especially in the tight “Our Like-Like Is a Caboodle,” which name-checks everyone from Skeletor and MacGyver to Punky Brewster and Richard Simmons. He can be cheeky, as he is in rockabilly-style “The Metrosexual Threw off My Gaydar” and in “EZ Heeb,” which starts off with a snippet of “Hava Nagila” before segueing into the Eminem-style refrain: “You know me / I’m the EZ Heeb / I’m famous coast to coast in every JCC.”

He gets serious in “An-ti-ci-pated,” rapping about being stuck in a gender-binary world and the fear that comes with simply entering a public bathroom. Most beautiful are the tracks “Day Breaks,” with Katz rapping over the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” about complex family relationships and missing his late mother when he’s home for Rosh Hashanah, and “Mourner’s Prayer,” which blends the Mourners’ Kaddish with pure poetry about his family’s loss of a daughter, and the confining complexities of being trans. “I’m calling on my community to commute, to move past passing judgment,” he testifies, “ ’cause it was 26 years before I saw anything beautiful in me.” But that beauty is more than evident in this lyrical collection.