Black Belt Eagle Scout – Mother of My Children

Mother of My Children is a vital and bold debut, giving a platform to the Native American experience through the familiar and historically monochromatic genre of grunge, which is given new life thanks to this fresh voice

Album Review by Tony Inglis | 27 Sep 2018
Album title: Mother of My Children
Artist: Black Belt Eagle Scout
Label: Saddle Creek
Release date: 28 Sep

As identity has become something people feel empowered by, rather than something to mask and diminish, in the face of a pent-up crowd of repulsive humans looking to use identity against societal groups as a tool to stigmatise with, modern rock music has been enriched by it. However, the voices of indigenous peoples still seem to be fighting to swim to the surface.

Perhaps the most well-known is Tanya Tagaq, an Inuk musician hailing from northern Canada, who celebrated a crossover moment in 2014 by winning the Polaris Music Prize. While she chooses to defiantly express her unique culture with her impassioned, traditional throat singing, on Mother of My Children, the debut album from Katherine Paul, otherwise known as Black Belt Eagle Scout, who grew up in the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in Washington state, ideas of Native American identity are channelled through spiky guitar and showers of feedback.

In a similar vein to the way Mitski used the grungy quiet-loud-quiet style to express her range of emotions pertaining to the Asian American experience on Your Best American Girl, here Paul channels the lessons learned from a musical education built on Hole and Nirvana, to give voice to a range of universal emotions, magnified by her unique place in the world. Even through sound alone, when Mother of My Children seems to lure you into a false sense of calm it jolts you back to life, as on the scorching guitar opening of Just Lie Down.

Whether it's the complex rush of what it means to be a “radical indigenous queer feminist,” as she describes herself; laying bare the heartache of her people’s history – the dangers they’ve faced in the past and, frighteningly, even now – on the haunting Indians Never Die; or simply lamenting unrequited love for the girl she just can’t have on the brilliant inner monologue of Soft Stud – 'Need you, want you, I know you’re taken' – and the lulling I Don’t Have You In My Life, the familiar tropes of the rock genre are given new life thanks to this fresh voice. In a still monochromatic genre, Mother of My Children presents a vital, bold debut and, hopefully, a sign of further change to come.

Listen to: Soft Stud, Indians Never Die, Mother of My Children

https://blackbelteaglescout.bandcamp.com/