Strange Medicine

Albumbeschreibung

Kaia Kater's fourth album, Strange Medicine, kicks in with what sounds like the song "The Witch" already in progress—as if joining a conversation that's been going for a while. Kater, the Canadian folk artist who does Americana so well, has said the song is inspired by movies like Barbie, Priscilla, 2015's The Witch, The Scarlet Letter and "these kind of idealized visions of the place that women should occupy, and [how] it's such a tightrope to walk." So she came up with a cinematic idea of her own—a woman branded a witch in pilgrim-era Salem who survives being burned at the stake and "now seeks her revenge on those who sought to destroy her." As woodwind trills, guitar follows a melancholy tune, and Aoife O'Donovan harmonizes, Kater sings, "I dreamt I moved through you and/ Burned my name into your chest." Her imagined cast of revolutionaries also take the bloody reins in "Mechanics of the Mind": "In the middle of the colony/ She sits by the guillotine/ Waiting for someone to behead." Shadowy and mysterious, the song plots a careful cat burglar's rhythm, bringing to mind Tori Amos circa mid '90s. And it's not just the stories of women. On "Fédon," Kater, who explored her father's journey as a political refugee from Grenada on Grenades, imagines what it felt like to join the attack by late 18th-century Grenadian insurrectionist Julien Fédon against British colonizers. The song starts out rather simple, Kater and her haunted banjo, before a moody storm stirs up, with restless drums and horns blowing in and the great Taj Mahal joining her on the chorus. Kater's banjo leads the way, too, on edgy "In Montreal," a nod to Leonard Cohen, Kate and Anna McGarrigle and other musical greats from that city; appropriately, Allison Russell—like Kater, a Black female banjoist and Americana artist from Montreal—joins in. "Floodlights" is an alt-rock take on smoky jazz, about seeing an old lover and feeling the power shift toward Kater herself: "When you were 29 and I was 17/ You coiled around me … You seem smaller now, a little pathetic/ After all these years of Cheshire cat grins, I'm free now." Musically inspired by Kate Bush's "Watching You Without Me," "The Internet" recounts a failed virtual performance during pandemic lockdown, when Kater knocked a glass of water onto her computer keyboard and killed her connection with the audience. It should be noted that Kater's voice, always rich and warm, sounds better than ever here. She floats like a feather on the wind on "Maker Taker" and "Tigers," even as her words assert dominance. Trying to reckon with her place as a Black woman in Americana, Kater has said the poetry of Lucille Clifton was her North star while writing the record: "born in babylon/ both nonwhite and woman/ what did i see to be except myself?" © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz