Album Of The Week: Ribbon Skirt Bite Down

How do you stop someone from rising through the ceiling? This is the first line of Ribbon Skirt’s "Deadhorse," the opening to their debut album Bite Down. It only gets more visceral and surreal from there: There's someone kicking through window panes. There's piss in a cup. There’s someone fucking up their whole life on a Wednesday. There's a midnight meeting at a 7-Eleven. There's black ice on the freeway. There’s someone crying on an airplane.

Ribbon Skirt, formerly Love Language, are led by Tashiina Buswa, who’s on a mission to communicate the Anishinaabe experience. Bite Down inhabits a turbulent, dreamlike version of reality, the lyrics poetic and the sound oscillating between fuzzy and frenetic. “Deadhorse,” along with other tracks like “Off Rez” and “Earth Eater,” is buoyed by blurry, Cocteau Twins-like guitars, and Buswa’s expressive drawl grapples with colonialism without ever explicitly mentioning it: “How do you stop someone from wanting more and more?” she wonders aloud. Yet there’s not a hint of anger or resentment; the track ends with a transcendent instrumental, as cosmic and colossal as a waterfall.

Despite the serious subject matter, Bite Down is relentlessly fun. “Off Rez” is an infectious post-punk anthem with a rich, jangly atmosphere and a playful bassline. Buswa’s voice glides up and down the scale while she sings of wanting to feel free. She refuses those who want to "solve the Indian problem once and for all" in the most whimsical of ways: "I’m gonna break into a dance down the block/ I’m gonna be your brand new headache to solve." “Cellophane” begins eerily with primal breaths serving as instruments before groovy guitars come in and turn the track into an energetic banger, bordering on dance-punk. The penultimate "Look What You Did" is also a jittery spurt, Buswa’s deadpan reminiscent of Dry Cleaning, a band who's frequently imitated yet rarely this impressively.

A car crash Buswa endured in British Columbia serves as a source of inspiration. “Joe’s toyota crashed into the mountainside/ Smudging stars across the pavement Sunday night,” Buswa’s Auto-Tuned voice recalls on “41” over sharp-edged guitars. The celestial finale “Earth Eater” pulls from that incident as well as she sings of “crashing the car under the floodlights.” On that track, she also draws from recurring nightmares of being drowned by her mother: “Stretching her hands above the water/ I think she wants to hold me under.” The guitars are lush and Buswa’s voice get lost behind them while backing vocals add a hallucinatory texture to the intense moment, which feels like the end of a movie.

“Mountains,” whose brooding, grungy edge takes influence from Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box," opens with the buzzing of bugs, offering the lonely but special feeling of a stroll on a summer night. “When I’m walking to the corner store/ Feels like I’m sinking to the ocean floor,” Buswa intones, her lilt surrounded by the insects’ song. It's as if gravity is suspended in the world of Bite Down; at any second, there's risk of someone levitating or plunging. On the Violent Femmes-like "Wrong Planet," a sense of doom yields a catchy catharsis: "Right timing/ Wrong planet/ It’s getting harder not to feel so abandoned," Buswa sings over ecstatically scrappy guitars.

Bite Down serves as an enrapturing debut, every track enticing and quickly enveloping. Throughout the record, Buswa offers her forgiveness as long as the colonizer looks at the damage they caused. She insists that "no one will curse the day you came." Bite Down is not an exercise in revenge; it is a storm of pure self-expression, which is even more powerful.

Bite Down is out 4/11 via Mint.

Other albums of note out this week:
• Bon Iver's SABLE, fABLE
• Speedway's A Life's Refrain
• Mamalarky's Hex Key
• Bedridden's Moths Strapped To Eachother's Backs
• Maria Usbeck's Naturaleza
• Bootsy Collins' Album Of The Year # 1 Funkateer
• Real Lies' We Will Annihilate Our Enemies
• Idle Heirs' Life Is Violence
• Daughter Of Swords' Alex
• Vegyn's Blue Moon Safari
• Nell Smith's Anxious
• Eyedress' Stoner
• Teen Mortgage's Devil Ultrasonic Dream
• Various Artists' Chet Baker Re:Imagined
• Elvenking's Reader Of The Runes - Luna
• Flummox's Southern Progress Those Damn Crows' God Shaped Hole
• Trousdale's Growing Pains
• Magnolia Park's VAMP
• Spin Doctors' Face Full Of Cake
• Valerie June's Owls, Omens, And Oracles
• Jon Pardi's HONKYTONK HOLLYWOOD
• Galactic & Irma Thomas' Audience With The Queen
• Sheldon Agwu's Kintsugi
• Röyksopp's True Electric
• Fred Moten & Brandon Lopez's Revision
• Tara Nome Doyle's Ekko
• The Driver Era's Obsession
• Dead Pioneers' PO$T AMERICAN
• Dope Lemon's Golden Wolf
• Stander's Collapsing
• Tapeworms' Grand Voyage
• Larum's The Music Of Hildegard von Bingen Part 2
• Cold Specks' Light For The Midnight
• Post Malone's Post Malone Tribute To Nirvana Live Album
• Bill Evans' Further Ahead: Live In Finland (1964-1969)
• Jeff Bridges' Slow Magic, 1977-1978
• Patsy Cline's Imagine That: The Lost Recordings (1954-1963)
• Wu-Tang Clan & Mathematics' Black Samson, The Bastard Swordsman: Wu-Tang, The Saga Continues Collection
• Public Image Ltd's First Issue (US Version)
• Dave Stewart's Dave Does Dylan
• The Album Leaf's Rotations
• Joni's Things I Left Behind
• PHONOLAB's Disturbia
• Muscadine Bloodline's ...And What Was Left Behind
• OK Go's And The Adjacent Possible
• Joe Kelly & The Royal Pharmacy's Cast Me Down
• Gerald Clayton's Ones & Twos
• Marty Stuart And His Fabulous Superlatives' Space Junk
• Lullahush's Ithaca
• Ledher Blue's Fait Divers
• The Northern Line's Throw A Fist
• Melys' Second Wind
• Jordan Firstman's Secrets
• System 7's Live Transmissions 02
• The Mars Volta's Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos Del Vacio
• Marianne Fatihfull's Burning Moonlight
• Various Artists' Lazarus (Adult Swim Original Series Soundtrack)
• Big Hands' Thauma
• Ben Seretan's Youth Pastoral (Deluxe)
• Record Setter's Evoke Intake EP
• Zach Templar's In Waves EP
• molto morbidi's Chocolate Ashtray EP
• fantasy of a broken heart's Chaos Practitioner EP
• Johanna Warren's The Night Of The Wind EP
• Set Dressing's I Can't Be Alone Tonite EP
• Robber Robber's Wild Guest EP
• Cortisa Star's E.M.O. (EVIL MOTION OVERLOAD) EP
• Steel Wool's Steel Wool EP