- A mixture of righteous indignation and warm, radical love makes for a gripping album about finding strength against all odds.
- "We were taken too young / I was entered too young," Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq repeats on "I Forgive Me," in a particularly harrowing snapshot of her new album, Tongues. It's a song about processing past trauma, finding strength in protecting others from what you once went through yourself. The lyrics make oblique, if not literal, reference to Canada's long (and recent) history of residential schools, which separated Indigenous children from their families, tried to erase their language and abused (and often killed) them. The First Nations genocide has become a focal point of Canadian cultural discourse following the discovery of unmarked mass graves at schools across the country, hundreds of bodies of dead children who were never found by their families. It's an almost unimaginable, shameful tragedy whose shadow casts over Tongues, an album that boldly points its finger—and righteous words—at the country and society that allowed it to happen.
Having worked with artists like Björk and Mike Patton in the past, Tagaq is renowned for her modern take on Inuit throat singing, and has long been embraced by the very institutions she rails against. Her past work laid out its forceful narratives with the alternately foreboding and joyous throat singing technique, but on Tongues Tagaq sings clearly in English (and, occasionally, Inuktitut), using her elastic voice as a discursive weapon, with many lyrics borrowed from her 2018 book Split Tooth. No longer can complicit listeners enjoy this music without thinking about what it means, and what went into creating it. Tongues explores a cultural legacy of death, violence and oppression through uncomfortably personal experiences, and comes out with something like hope, or at least defiant survival.
The album opens with a command: "Eat your morals," she snarls, in a send-up of vegan activists who have long protested the Inuit practice of subsistence seal hunting, a cause close to Tagaq's heart. From there, the LP addresses the importance and loss of language ("Tongues"), the power of vulnerability ("Do Not Fear Me") and the weight of generational trauma ("I Forgive Me"). Her voice is backed up by shapeshifting electronics—co-produced by Saul Williams and mixed by Gonjasufi—that mimic organic textures and feel as malleable and unpredictable as her voice. The album's wordless songs are almost as riveting as their counterparts.
The electronics come to life on both versions of "Colonizer," a brutal song that originated as an alternate soundtrack to the 1922 film Nanook Of The North. Here the rhythms approach something funky, but Tagaq's screams—"Colonizer! You're guilty!"—quash any sense of reverie. "Teeth Agape," on the other hand, puts the spotlight on Tagaq's voice as she boasts, "Touch my children / And my teeth welcome your windpipe... Utter the name / and be crushed by leg / Grown strong from / Holding up weight." Over and over, Tagaq finds strength through enduring adversity, but she also highlights how this process is violent and unfair, how none of these injustices have been truly addressed or even ended. "I really wanted to put ['Colonizer'] out as a song because Canadians have really got it in their heads that these atrocities [against Indigenous people] happened in the past," she told Apple Music. "And there's nothing to be done about it now. And really, it's happening right now, right this second—it never stopped."
The closer "Earth Monster" brings things to a more tender but still visceral place. A stunning ode to her daughter, written over a decade ago when she was still a child, it's a love song that recognizes the full spectrum of emotion—"I am her love / her hate / and Earth in one... Her realness / Her anger / and her trust"—welcoming the whole experience of life for her daughter, not just sunshine and roses, but hopefully a better one than Tagaq's own. Tagaq knows full well humanity's capability for monstrosity. But sometimes being a monster is a form of empowerment in itself, the ability for superhuman strength in the face of life-threatening abuse.
But it's "I Forgive Me" that stands as the most incisive emotional exploration on Tongues. As Tagaq speaks of her darkest experiences, she's not interested in making nice with those that have harmed her—only forgiving herself for her own suffering, to allow herself to move on in her own way. "Do not forgive and forget," she spits out. "I protect and prevent / Make them eat shame and repent / I was entered too young," the last line repeated again and again, underlining that no matter how hard one tries to move on, the past can't be undone. This is the greatest lesson of Tongues, where Tagaq confronts a dark history—and a present where nothing has changed—with the most gripping and powerful music of her career. Tongues doesn't so much document or respond to a cultural tragedy as demand to know what the fuck the rest of us are all going to do about it, putting the damage and fury on riveting display.
Tracklist01. In Me
02. Tongues
03. Colonizer
04. Teeth Agape
05. Birth
06. I Forgive Me
07. Nuclear
08. Do Not Fear Love
09. Earth Monster
10. Colonizer (Tundra Mix)