Inuit Legend, by Beatrice Deer
As Bob Dylan could have told you shortly after he first appeared onstage with an electric guitar, traditions can be traps and guilt trips. Half-Inuk and half-Mohawk singer and songwriter Beatrice Deer could passionately elaborate on that thought from a couple decades of experience.
Instead, she offers Inuit Legend, a long-player that blends her heritage with indie-rock instrumentation and almost dares the listener to separate those artistic elements, because the instrumentation helps reshape how she tells tales—some historical, some mythological—drawn from her ancestry.
The opening track, “Arranged,” speaks to a particularly divisive tradition: up until the 1960s, arranged marriages were part of Inuit culture. As the bride and groom who become wife and husband, Deer and relative newcomer Johnny Saunders convey reluctance and tenderness with a conviction easily understood by those of us unfamiliar with their tribal language.
Deer doesn’t rely entirely on liner-note translations, though; she also sings in English and French. Whatever the words or their origins, she renders them beautifully, whether soaring through the simple “didn’t wanna” refrains of “Aukkauti” or implementing throat singing as a powerful introductory rhythm to “She’s in the Abyss.”
It isn’t difficult to think of the late Dolores O’Riordan, whose powerhouse vocals had a similar culture-crossing effect when the Cranberries were at their best, and the distance between O’Riordan’s Limerick and Deer’s Montreal isn’t far when heard primally.
Musically, Deer actually swings close to the Cranberries’ fondness for the Smiths with “Falcon and the Woman,” while the reverb-moody wandering of “The Bear” moves under the same stars as the big-sky Americana of Calexico, and “The Fog” shares a twangy rough-and-readiness with Wednesday.
A purist might argue that the accessibility of the music obscures the importance of the stories, but truly that accessibility enhances the storytelling. Inuit Legend and Beatrice Deer bring the eternal and the past into the now.
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