Kaia Kater – Grenades
Smithsonian Folkways – Out Now
Born in Montreal of Grenadian heritage, for her third album Kaia Kater has not only expanded her sonic palette beyond the Appalachian-influenced clawhammer banjo sound of her previous work, embracing a fuller band sound with Christine Bougie on guitars and lap steel; Andrew Ryan on upright bass, Anna Ruddick on electric bass; producer Erin Costelo on keys and drummer Brad Kilpatrick, but has also explored her identity and sense of belonging as a hyphenate Canadian.
The album draws heavily on her father, Deno Hurst’s, history, fleeing to Canada in 1986 as part of a student exchange programme following the Reagan administration’s invasion of Grenada. Indeed, there are several interludes on the album where he can be heard recounting those events, linking his past to his daughter’s present in a world beset by issues of displacement, immigration and conflict.
As part of the process, Kater returned to Grenada for the first time since becoming an adult, seeking to explore her family background and legacy. On Meridian Ground, for example, a number that particularly shows the influence of Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns, she sings of the island’s wharfmen, the half-breeds and how “My auntie died in a one-room house on the top road with the candles cold, and a smile upon her face. We run inside and place our kites by her bed frame. She surges higher, the hills and the gullies fall.”
The pointedly punning slow, bluesy title track itself is specifically seen through her father’s eyes as a child, the poetic lyrics mingling images of “Rain heavy like carpet bombs, sweetgrass and lemonade” as the planes “duck and punch/Melt the candy clouds and parchment lungs.” It’s a mood reflecting one struck earlier on La Misere, a brief call and response number she found in the Smithsonian Folkways Archives sung a capella in French griot. She returns to unaccompanied mode for Hydrants, a song that pulls together both images of conflict (“tremors come quickly/To level the streets/And us, with the end of the world at our feet”) and peace (“You hold me and we get in line/To drink another day like wine”).
In the sleeve notes, she writes how “There are visions of pain, of war, and of resentment and anger. But there are also visions of life, of youth, and of plucking oneself out of the muck to look up at the sky.” As such, the lyrics are not always immediate, meanings buried behind codes, imagery and personal experiences, the likes of the laid back, jazzy chorus New Colossus (“Out the window trees bend down to kiss my thigh/I multiply and now the earth divides/You spurn me like a dog but now I double back/Dragging big machines and steady for attack”) and the slow waltzing, pizzicato banjo accompanied Heavenly Track (“You shake the trees and feel the bodies tumble down/You paint your clothes and hang them on the line/They beat the city red with bloody siren sounds/And you’re on the ground, you’re on the ground”) are particularly difficult to navigate.
By contrast, on the choppily skittering Canyonland, lines like “There was a time when all I knew was all I wanted/When every crop was set ablaze/Like the bird I have turned and pulled you into me, whistling all the themes to your resentment” clearly reference her embracing of her father’s past as part of her identity. The same holds true of the dreamy undulating Starry Day where she sings “Backwards now you dance to freedom/Lift your gutted lungs and sing” and both the narcotic bluesy tones of Everly with its opening up to a sense of liberation in “When he comes, when he comes for me/I’ll be ripe as the lemon upon the tree/When he comes when he comes for me/I’ll be free, free” and the sparse banjo etched The Right One with its repeated closing refrain of “I will be released.”
Warmed by trombone and French horn, it ends on a personal cathartic note with Poets Be Buried, looking back over what she has explored (“I asked my father if this is all there is. A home that won’t claim you, a country that rescinds”) and forward to the future of the next generation (“I had a daughter and I taught her all I knew/Fight in the gutter and love the work you do”), a reflection on “the sickness of time” but also a declaration of selfhood and purpose (“I am my own saint, a center to hold, a cannonball”) in the face of those cold, lonely winter nights of the soul.
Impressionistic rather than explicit, thoughts and emotions are woven through the musical fabric as much as the lyrics, it marks a huge leap on her musical and personal journey, and sharing it is a privilege.
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