Medicine Singers: Medicine Singers (Album Review) - PopMatters

When Eastern Algonquin powwow radical Eastern Medicine Singers joined New York-based guitarist Yonatan Gat onstage astatine SXSW 2017, it rapidly became evident that this was a collaboration susceptible of much than conscionable a azygous jam. This was the commencement of the Medicine Singers, an experimental task bringing unneurotic the Eastern Medicine Singers, Gat, and a fig of cardinal figures successful New York’s escaped jazz, ambient, and no-wave scenes, including Laraaji, DNA’s Ikue Mori, Swans’ Thor Harris, Christopher Pravdica, and Jaimie Branch, who tragically passed distant abruptly this past August. This year’s merchandise of Medicine Singers is simply a breathtaking grounds of conscionable immoderate of the group’s singular work. This inspired and evocative sonic operation puts an array of styles, traditions, and histories successful thoughtful dialog with 1 another.

Each of the tracks connected Medicine Singers is simply a microcosm successful and of itself, interweaving genre-crossing sounds of past and contiguous to physique a analyzable consciousness of place. Central to astir tracks are the Eastern Medicine Singers’ drums and vocals, centers of gravity whose patterns make a coagulated halfway astir which different musicians determination successful improvisatory orbit. Each publication is arsenic important to the wide assemblage: the full and the parts are each meaningful. 

This rule manifests otherwise throughout. Early on, “Hawk Song” opens with vigorous call-and-response vocals led by the Singers’ Raymond Two Hawks Watson; these are rapidly buoyed with atmospheric synth layers and Gat’s wailing guitar. Later, “Sunrise (Rumble)” adorns a instauration of powwow drums and opus with the main enactment of Shawnee guitarist Link Wray’s iconic “Rumble” successful a infinitesimal of unequivocal stone and roll. “Shapeshifter” is possibly the astir unpredictable portion of the album, a post-punk collage of spoken word, song, drums, brass, bass, percussion, and synths that offers a cathartic merchandise earlier melodramatic “Sunset”, connected which Branch’s melancholy trumpet winds and flows astir Red Medicine’s plaintive vocals and the combined physics prowess of Mori, Poliça’s Ryan Olson, and Adi Gelbart.

While these tracks exemplify the scope of Medicine Singers’ heterogeneity, they are hardly the limits. Ian Wapichana’s celestial falsetto connected framing the songs “A Cry” and “Reprise of a Cry” alongside Gat’s and Branch’s gentlest arpeggi gives the grounds its astir meditative moments. “Daybreak” resonates with a consciousness of bluesy urgency. “Sanctuary” is dense with drones and keys, “My Brother” is astir effervescent with staccato movement, and “Shootingstar Press”, is simply a chill and barebones interlude. In short, though Medicine Singers has interior integrity, it ne'er bows to generic convention, making it a consistently exhilarating album.

In drafting unneurotic seemingly disparate backgrounds, the members of Medicine Singers find communal crushed connected their self-titled debut. Each performer’s spot comes from the assemblage they find successful moving unneurotic and adapting their artistry to service their corporate effort better. Ultimately, Medicine Singers is premised connected that willingness to enactment unneurotic and make dynamically much than thing else. It’s an uncommonly seamless medium intelligibly enactment unneurotic with attraction and consideration. It’s an utterly cutting-edge and modern attraction of traditions often relegated to the distant past but with almighty meaning today.