Bekka Ma'iingan

Album review

Daniel Monkman's music as Zoon ruminates on the artist's Indigenous ancestry as well as his own personal quest for healing and enlightenment. Following the release of his 2020 album Bleached Wavves, which drew from shoegaze, dream pop, and psychedelia, he collaborated with Status/Non-Status and made a less distortion-heavy indie rock album, Sewn Back Together, as part of the duo OMBIIGIZI. Two Zoon EPs came out: the collaboration-heavy Big Pharma appeared in 2022, preceding a second full-length, Bekka Ma'iingan. Bleached Wavves was already an elaborate, expansive album, and Bekka Ma'iingan is even more ambitious, incorporating Owen Pallett-composed string arrangements and drifting further away from conventional rock songwriting. "All Around You," an instrumental consisting of rippling waves of gentle guitar strums, opens the album, preceding "Brave New World (Without You)," with Monkman's voice at the center of a pool of floating guitars and strings, and reverb-heavy drums ticking in at the end. "Care" is a bewildering shoegaze song with a rusty, sludgy guitar tone and half-buried vocals which seem to express endless malaise and hopelessness. The string-heavy ballad "Dodem" is one of the album's sweeter, calmer moments, and it leads into the Lee Ranaldo-featuring "Niizh Manidoowig (2 Spirit)," an ethereal soundscape filled with trilling flutes, levitating strings, and slow, reversed guitar lines. "A Language Disappears" has jangling guitars and an insistent vocal hook, but still feels distant and half-dreamt. The noisy guitar returns on "Gaagige," meaning "forever," as Monkman reflects on accepting the cycle of life and death. Bekka Ma'iingan requires multiple listens in order to make sense of the inventive arrangements and idiosyncratic production, but it's a powerful meditation on existence and destiny.

© Paul Simpson /TiVo