Black Belt Eagle Scout
The Land, the Water, the Sky
SADDLE CREEK
Black Belt Eagle Scout—the stage name of multi-instrumentalist Katherine Paul, or KP—made a pivotal journey of self-discovery in 2020. It didn’t involve any spirit guides or a death in the family. KP just got back to basics and returned from her adopted home of Portland to the ancestral lands of her tribe, the Swinomish, along the Skagit River in Washington state.
The Land, the Water, the Sky is an indie rock album about homecomings and reawakenings of mind and soul, with the beautiful backdrop you see on its cover serving as inspiration. The same Northwest electric guitar blueprint is still there from Paul, who grew up listening to Hole, Nirvana, and Built to Spill, but the sense of space found within Swinomish traditional pow-wow music also springs up this time. This is an album that requires some amount of patience, as inclement guitar riffs and booming drum patterns unfurl themselves overhead in each mix. It has many similarities to a slow-current rock album that places a heavy emphasis on mantra-like guitar grooves (“Spaces”) over melodic highs and lows.
The wonders of Earth have a substantial impact on the album, but there are darker corners as well. Opener “My Blood Runs Through This Land” takes KP’s mental health and utilizes it as a wellspring of musical inspirations that carry over to the closer “Don’t Give Up.” KP noted that she created The Land, the Water, the Sky to “record and reflect upon [her] journey back to [her] homelands and the challenges and the happiness it brought.“ Her thoughts on the album will naturally get you thinking about its latent themes of interconnectivity. She’s been an introspective artist ever since 2018’s Mother of My Children, wherein she publicly mourned the loss of her mentor, artist Geneviève Castrée (Phil Elverum’s spouse), after her short battle with pancreatic cancer.
Black Belt Eagle Scout’s shoegaze-leaning rock music is ripe with songs that reach for some shred of inner peace, and familiar environments seemed to help with that pursuit for the songwriter. The down-on-his-luck character Bucky from the FX series Reservation Dogs—a show KP’s music has appeared on—has a lot in common with the themes on this record. He drops some cosmic perspective in one of his most enlightened scenes: “Every element of our bodies was made inside an exploding star. We just borrow stardust until we die, and then we return it for something else to use.”
Black Belt Eagle Scout also finds herself looking beyond the daily concerns on The Land, the Water, the Sky. As a result, her music can be just as heartbreaking and thought-provoking as meeting any spirit guide chilling at your windowsill.
