Plenty of forms of underground music started out as artists using their work to speak to others in their chosen community about their lives, their shared views, and their connection (sometimes flawed) with the larger world. OMBIIGIZI is a group that moves that thinking forward -- in addition to working within the confines of the artier and more polemic sides of indie rock and shoegaze, the band's founders are also Canadian First Nations people who navigate between two cultures, that of their ancestry in the Ojibway Nation as well as being two guys living in Ontario in the 21st century. 2022's Sewn Back Together is the creation of Daniel Monkman, best known for his work with the band Zoon, and Adam Sturgeon, leader of Status/Non Status. Both groups often write about the troubled legacy and contemporary realities of Canada's First Nations peoples, and those same themes run through Sewn Back Together's nine songs. But while a quiet anger informed by centuries of injustice can be heard here, Monkman and Sturgeon aren't ranters in this context. Instead, OMBIIGIZI most often finds them trying to speak back to their family who are separated from them by time and mortality; the tone is poetic and evocative, and there's less fury than a shared sorrow, a need to reach out to the spirits of those who came before in a bid for guidance and succor. There is a faint echo of Indigenous music in these tracks, though OMBIIGIZI primarily trade in dream pop constructed from clouds of sustained keyboards and layers of guitar, as the melodies and rhythms drift between languid sonic landscapes and rougher plains built from distorted guitars and fractured rhythms (and both sides coexist in "Birch Bark Paper Trails"). OMBIIGIZI's music is as eloquent in its way as its lyrics; there is love, longing, and a passionate desire to communicate that's the beating heart of these performances, and Monkman and Sturgeon (as well as producer Kevin Drew and accompanists Eric Lourenço and Drew McLeod) have given us an album that speaks to the personal thoughts of the artists while engaging any listener concerned with justice and possessed of a need to speak to the loved ones they may never have even known. Sewn Back Together is a remarkable, affecting album and a collaboration that brings out the best in each artist, and hopefully Monkman and Sturgeon will have more to tell us in the future.
© Mark Deming /TiVo