Katherine Paul had been based in Portland for the better part of a decade -- first as part of bands like Forest Park and Genders, then under her solo alias, Black Belt Eagle Scout -- when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, halting a North American tour in support of her second album, 2019's At the Party with My Brown Friends. While her 2017 debut had grappled with identity and acceptance as an Indigenous queer woman, the follow-up found her more comfortable in her own skin and looking to things like connection and inspiration. Black Belt Eagle Scout's third album signifies an unexpected change of fate and perspective, with Paul moving back to the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community where she was raised (on Puget Sound), in early 2020. For her, the time period's mix of grief, loneliness, and frustration was matched by a sense of belonging and embrace as well as by the potent physical surroundings -- the Skagit River, towering cedar trees, tide flats, and mountain vistas -- of her ancestral lands. It's a dichotomy reflected musically on 2023's The Land, The Water, The Sky. While there are moments of quiet reflection and affection here, Paul still embraces dissonant alt-rock textures on parts of the album, including on opener "My Blood Runs Through This Land," a noisy, borderline shoegaze-metal entry with menacing chords and barely intelligible lyrics. (Paul has said the song depicts the intensity of the tribe's collective history, and that churning guitars and impulsive guitar lines represent running freely.) More intimate but still on the melancholy side, second track "Sedna" employs wispier vocals and more-structured rhythms before an unexpected duet with Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), "Salmon Stinta," almost overwhelms with bittersweetness in the form of gentle, percussion-free strumming, Paul's wordless introductory melody, and lyrics about fish swimming upstream. Elverum eventually reinforces both Paul's lilting melodies and the objects of her attention. The rest of The Land, The Water, The Sky proceeds in similarly poignant fashion, alternating between sparsity and bombast but never quite shaking its melancholy tone, with the possible exception of bouncy, morning-after indie pop outlier "Fancy Dance" and midtempo closer "Don't Give Up." The latter song leaves listeners on an empowering note while bookending the album with the opening track's "I know you're watching me" and repeated final words, "The land, the water, and the sky." ~ Marcy Donelson, Rovi

1		My Blood Runs Through This Land
2		Sedna
3		Salmon Stinta
4		Blue
5		On the River
6		Nobody
7		Fancy Dance
8		Scicud? (A Narrow Place)
9		Treeline
10		Understanding
11		Spaces
12		Don't Give Up