Bandcamp Look at the cover for a while before you play anything. It is a photograph run as a negative, blue and white and grainy, and it takes a moment to resolve. In the foreground a figure in a feathered headdress, seen in profile, head lowered. Behind them a European devotional painting: a crowned, haloed figure with a hand extended toward that lowered head, church architecture receding into the corners. Two picture traditions laid over each other so that one appears to be reaching for the other. Nothing on the sleeve explains it and nothing needs to.
The band are from Barrie and Tkaronto, they call what they do Turtle Island street metal because nothing else fitted, and the record is about sovereignty, refusal and staying alive. Alexander writes and sings and plays guitar, Kz is on drums, Coltyn on bass. Knowing that changes how the first seven tracks read, because on their own they are a very good, very direct sludge record and not obviously more than that.
Those seven tracks are held remarkably tight. They sit within a decibel and a half of each other in level, they are bright for the genre with around a quarter of the energy above five kilohertz, and four of them keep the distance between their softest and loudest passages under nine decibels. This is music built to be played in a room with no stage, at one volume, with no dynamic escape hatch. “Hate Begotten of Hate” is the most compressed thing here and the point where that approach is most obviously a choice rather than an accident. “Burden of Heart” is the one that opens up, and it arrives late enough to feel like the record finally exhaling.
“Death of the Indian” is the oldest song on the album, first released on its own four years ago, and the band have brought it back as the fourth track. It is the coldest and most dissonant thing on the first half, and it is also the moment the sleeve stops being an image and becomes a caption.
Then the record stops.
“Liberatory Violence” closes the album and it is not a song. It measures about ten decibels quieter than everything preceding it, with peaks standing far above the average in a way nothing else here comes close to, almost no low end, and the weight shifted up into the low midrange. What that describes, in numbers, is a room rather than a band. It is a collage: dialogue lifted from the Canadian film Clearcut, water, birds, footsteps, gunfire, and then the water and the birds left running on their own.
Ending a hardcore record on three minutes of field recording is a risk, because it can only work if the thirty minutes before it have earned the silence. They have. Seven tracks of unrelieved pressure make the last one land as release, and the sequencing is the album’s best idea by some distance. The water is still there after the gunfire. That is the whole thesis, and the band trust it enough not to sing it.
Where the album gives ground is in the middle. “Living To Dream Again”, “Destroyed With Regret” and “Abandon Suffering” open the record at nearly identical brightness, level and restraint, and “Hate Begotten of Hate” rejoins them at track five. Four songs occupying the same narrow space is a lot before anything shifts, and it means the first third asks you to take the intensity on trust.
The production, credited on the release to the band with Jaye Schwarzer, is unglamorous in the right way. Drums sit forward, guitars are grainy rather than scooped, the vocals stay intelligible, which for a record whose words are the point is not a small thing.
Plenty of bands write about resistance. Fewer build a record whose shape performs it. The last track here does something the lyrics could not have done on their own, and it does it by shutting up.
Measured track by track, the album splits into two unequal halves: seven pieces and one. The seven share a tonal signature so close that they could be takes from a single session, and the sharpest internal contrast is between “Hate Begotten of Hate”, the most tightly held thing on the record, and “Burden of Heart”, which runs roughly three times the span between its softest and loudest moments. “Death of the Indian” is the darkest of the seven and the only one that noticeably pulls back from the treble the others share. The eighth piece breaks every figure the record has established. Its average level drops off a cliff, its peaks tower over that average by a margin nothing else here approaches, and the energy that had been sitting in the bottom end moves up into the low midrange. Those are the numbers of a space being recorded rather than instruments being played, and the album ends on them.
Standout tracks: Liberatory Violence, Burden of Heart, Death of the Indian
