Katherine Paul, who performs under the moniker Black Belt Eagle Scout, first learned to drum from her family’s drum group, the Skagit Valley Singers. Years later, her dynamic percussion infuses her third album, the intimate The Land, the Water, the Sky, with frictionless momentum. Sometimes, Paul attacks her kit with abandon; elsewhere, a steady beat slowly builds into a rolling boil. All at once or slow and steady: Both approaches evoke urgency and a need to escape. It’s time for Paul to head home. The Land, the Water, the Sky, is an intimate survey of Paul’s rocky, COVID-era return trip from Portland to her ancestral lands in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and the hard-won peace she found once she arrived.
If home is where the heart is, then each song on The Land, the Water, the Sky—which is carved out of the same cinematic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-style of indie rock that Built to Spill perfected a generation ago—is a variation of a heartbeat. There is the galloping pace of “Nobody,” a charged but breezy track in which Paul, sounding more self-assured than ever, boils the lack of Indigenous representation in the arts down to a simple, earnest declaration: “Nobody sang it for me like I wanna sing it to you.” The pulse quickens on “Fancy Dance,” a brisk, cheeky song featuring a racing guitar melody that sounds like a crush on the brink of reciprocation. “Last night/I’ll always remember you,” Paul practically sighs, before getting to the kicker: “Lying there in the nude.” If this is flirting, she’s very good at it.
Paul is at her most vulnerable on “My Blood Runs Through This Land.” The album opener pays homage to her ancestors by recording the feelings she encounters when she wanders through her homeland, dipping her toes in the water at Snee Oosh Beach and paddling through Similk Bay: “We like to see our futures bright and/I know you speak through me I/Feel it in the sound of water/Touching all the rocks I feel.” There is horror in her people’s history, which Paul brings to life with distorted guitars and ominous, aggressive drums, recalling the biting sound of the Cranberries’ “Zombie.” (That song was also, in part, about crimes committed against a country’s people.) But there is peace and beauty too, and all that fuzz and buzz still cannot drown out Paul’s bright, delicate vocals.
A faint echo of pow wow singing, twined with violin, forms the backdrop of the lilting “Spaces.” Paul’s reverberant, wide-open sound suggests a sense of possibility and the broad sweep of history, while songs like the gentle, gorgeous “Salmon Stinta” and the sprawling “Sedna” ground her music in specific locations. But The Land, the Water, the Sky is more than just a portrait of a place. During a period of collective trauma, Paul searched for healing and found it in the many connections she forged at home: with her ancestors, her parents (who lend their powerful voices to the chorus of “Spaces”), and nature. These are love songs to a community and a lineage that taught Paul how to survive.
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