“I want it now, never, always,” Tashiina Buswa sings on “Look What You Did,” the penultimate track on Ribbon Skirt’s debut album, Bite Down. It’s a decent summation of her storytelling style: Everything is simultaneously happening, has already happened, hasn’t happened yet, and will never happen. Each memory is in constant danger of getting smothered in distortion, trampled by drums, or even warped by Auto-Tune into a funhouse-mirror reflection of itself—so you’d better listen carefully.
Formerly known as Love Language, Ribbon Skirt are the Montreal-based duo of singer and guitarist Tashiina Buswa and multi-instrumentalist Billy Riley; they’re named after a traditional Native American and First Nations garment symbolizing resilience and femininity—a nod to Buswa’s Anishinaabe heritage. Bite Down is many things: a reevaluation of Buswa and Riley’s musical inclinations, a first-person account of inherited colonial trauma, and a refreshing take on some of contemporary indie rock’s most overused influences (shoegaze, grunge, post-punk that leans so far into the second word that you might as well do away with the first). Co-produced by Scott “Monty” Munro (of Preoccupations) and Marlaena Moore, and mixed by Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, the record has a grainy, tactile feel reminiscent of Live Through This. Its room tone is as pronounced as any individual instrument; in Bite Down’s most emotionally dense moments, you can hear the heat moving between wood and wire.
Ribbon Skirt call to mind the more roughed-up offerings from Michelle Zauner (or the prettier ones from Mannequin Pussy), but more than anyone else, Buswa’s modern gothic vignettes and ragged yet pliable vocals recall Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman. Buswa isn’t one to shy away from morbidity, irreverence, or the occasional primal howl—because some things are better expressed with no words at all. Bite Down embodies the claustrophobia of a present cluttered by the past, of a life interrupted by the stories that’ll be told about it. Mundanity and tragedy spill from Buswa’s pen with equal urgency. The pile of incident reports grows high with dead uncles, cop cars, White Jesus, nightmares about drowning, and piss in cups.
On the jangly ballad “Off-Rez,” Buswa rejects whitewashed, tokenizing narratives of Indigeneity, her delivery landing somewhere between ’90s slacker deadpan and Valley Girl uptalk (“They want 2000s Buffy Marie…They want the pipe and the drum”). As the tactics of colonialism shapeshift, so does Buswa’s grief. “Off-Rez” takes aim at the subtly insidious ways that anti-Indigenous racism persists. “I’m gonna break into a dance down the hall/I’m gonna be your brand new headache to solve,” she declares, tossing sand into the gears of bureaucratic systems that “make these Indians run.” An Anishinaabe person living in a major Canadian city, Buswa grapples with a loss of cultural identity on multiple levels. “I wanna preserve every part that makes me” she sings, “Not only know but really feel that I’m free.”
