On an album with the musical charms of British art-rock, the Indigenous writer and scholar uses our connections with water to explore the revolutionary power of community.
Willie Dunn’s 1971 song “I Pity the Country” remains one of North America’s most stirring protest standards. The Indigenous singer and activist canters through a litany of grievances with Canada’s so-called civil society—power-grabbing politicians, money-hungry people, bull-headed police, and all the pollution, subjugation, and suffering that ensue. But Dunn’s philippic is less remarkable for what it lambastes than what it lifts up: the notion that these seemingly mighty folks are the wretched and the woeful, because they’re too busy with themselves to notice there’s an easier way to live. Who wants to be, as Dunn puts it so incisively, “a man who thrives on hate”?
Fifty years later, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has made her own phosphorescent rendition of “I Pity the Country” the centerpiece of her singular new album, Theory of Ice. Like Dunn, Simpson is of mixed Scottish and Indigenous ancestry—she is a member of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg people, native to southern Ontario. The novelist, poet, singer, and scholar has emerged as one of the most ardent voices for an intersectional understanding of North America’s Indigenous populations. Theory of Ice is an inviting manifestation of that work, turning seven of Simpson’s poems about water and our inborn relationship to it into sophisticated folk-pop that twinkles like the Clientele and Talk Talk. Simpson poignantly surveys the damage done and, like Dunn, suggests there’s another way forward.
Theory of Ice hinges on Simpson’s version of “I Pity the Country,” with a wash of echoing guitars and astral harmonies anchored by militant drums that would feel at home behind PJ Harvey or Nick Cave. Dunn’s acoustic rendition was the lament of one man, something you would sit and dutifully absorb. Simpson’s electric surge, however, offers both a communal outcry and a velvet-gloved demand that, if you can hear her, you join her in reimagining your relationship to the people and places that keep you alive. Dunn’s stern words become Simpson’s full cri de coeur.
The rest of Theory of Ice is not so explicit—its revelations are small, its calls for revolution more subtle. Simpson alternates between her plaintive, reserved speaking voice and a gentle singing tone, as if always trying to deliver hard news as softly as possible. She begins, for instance, with a pair of spellbinding songs about what changes when the ice above a river or lake melts with Spring’s arrival. That fundamental shift has profound consequences, she notes, from food supplies to shelter systems. Simpson invokes the Anishinaabe concept of “aabawe,” a term that implies that we adapt alongside the world, loosening up and breaking free like the ice.
At least until we can’t anymore. During the tragic but gorgeous ballad “Failure of Melting,” Simpson looks on as the ice collapses too much and too soon. “The caribou sit measuring emptiness/The fish study giving up,” she sings, her voice striking the same bittersweet tone as Kimya Dawson. Simpson alludes to decades of protests and warnings from Indigenous northerners about the deleterious effects of their southern neighbors’ environmental disregard, how it’s melting their very foundations. Above the lullaby-like guitars of “The Wake,” Simpson mourns the ways we’ve pushed natural cycles of life and death into unsustainable overdrive. “Everything we tried/To grow this year has died,” she sings, suggesting there’s a point when you’ve sown so many problems there is nothing left to reap.
A precise thinker but impressionistic writer, Simpson webs together concrete images and ideas into clouds, their intriguing shapes never entirely fixed. At one point, she namechecks the temperature at which water is most dense—39 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning it sinks—and makes this basic fact feel as enigmatic as lines about how “the sky is falling up.” The elliptical playing and production on Theory of Ice reinforce that feeling of discovery, from Tanner Pare’s circuitous drumming during “Surface Tension” to the refracted neon synthesizers of “Viscosity.” There’s always enough motion here to grab your attention but enough blank space for the songs to seem mysterious and enchanting, like there’s something left to learn.
“I Pity the Country” doesn’t leave you hanging—it offers an alternative of revolution, kindness, and real community. Likewise, remedying our problems, or at least trying, feels as important to Simpson as documenting them. As “Viscosity” throbs, she suggests putting down our phones and resisting the urge to engage in “feeding fish to insecurities.” Instead, she gathers with her friends on the beach, reveling in the air and the opportunity to sit silently in one another’s company. She returns to the fire for closer “Head of the Lake,” a powerful ode to the atavistic necessity of connection in a world mitigated by unimaginable convenience. “The smoke did the things we couldn’t,” she says as if with a reserved smile. “I hold your hand without touching it.” It’s hard to imagine a better sentiment for a time when an unnatural disaster has broken our sense of shared spaces—or for the limited time we have left not to repeat the same mistakes.
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