OMBIIGIZI - SHAME
Arts & Crafts
Released on November 1st, 2024
A surface-level listen to Shame, the new release from OMBIIGIZI, delivers a highly listenable but intricately crafted alt-pop-rock offering - a little emo, a little indie, a little shoegaze (or moccasin-gaze, as Monkman has described his own style), hummable and overall kind of nice. Listen a little closer, and there’s more going on.
As a follow-up to 2022’s acclaimed (Polaris and Juno nominated) debut Sewn Back Together, the new album from the shared project featuring Daniel Monkman of Zoon and Adam Sturgeon of Status/Non-Status is another standout release: layered, lush and cathartic. With distinctive Arts & Crafts-y influence (owed at least in part to production from Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew), tracks alternate between Monkman’s cloudy vocals and Sturgeon’s more angular tones - and range from dreamy to anthemic to folky. Incorporating jangle and fuzz, coo and growl, four-on-the-floor and polyrhythm, 90s alt and traditional Anishinaabe inspirations, Shame is both ear-worm catchy and relentlessly creative. The songs are obviously composed with intention and deep care, and they feel sort of circular and spiraling, falling into swirling pockets that swell, rise, fall, and dance.
Thematically and lyrically, the layers go deeper still. As implied by the album title, and in the band’s own description, this new record dives a little deeper into painful and murky realms than their debut record: "Shame is a thing we all share…While the last album focused a lot on the positive force of healing despite odds, Shame lets things slide - it shares the things we don’t always say, it calls to others to heal and reminds them it’s OK - to feel, to be angry or sad, and that the world we experience can set the drag on high. But always it calls you in and forward."
Not having the same lived experiences as its Anishinaabe composers, I recognize there are layers of Shame to which I am an outsider. Still, one really remarkable aspect of the record is how deeply it manifests both the universal and the particular. Because we all know some of these experiences of shame, loss, hurt, and pain,as well as joy and connection, it is poignant and relatable. But on this album there are also unique hurts and shames and loves that are particularly intimate and specific, manifesting the people, places, feelings, and experiences of the songwriters, and what those experiences are like in a place like so-called Canada. The result is a powerful, honest, and healing set of songs.
Shame as a concept is maybe not the most intuitively inviting theme around which to center a record, and indeed, Shame is slightly more jagged than Sewn Back Together. But through their compassionate and honest treatment of tender subjects, OMBIIGIZI creates a sense of expansive welcome that does offer invitation into catharsis and beauty, even while treading along edges of hurt, shame, and vulnerability.
- Chris Lammiman