Lucie Idlout - Swagger (2009) - flac format with covers

Tracks: ======= 1. Berlin 3:20 2. Whiskey Breath 3:57 3. My Shine 2:58 4. Sorry 4:06 5. Belly Down 3:38 6. The 40 Mile 2:17 7. Lovely Irene 3:34 8. Tonight 4:38 9. You (Devil) 2:54 10. For You Review: ======= From Globe and Mail MUSIC: INTERVIEW Rock 'n' roll swagger with an Inuit heart BRAD WHEELER February 28, 2009 'It's all about attitude. It's a level of confidence, self-assuredness, control, and a little bit of danger." Lucie Idlout calls her new album Swagger, but does she have it? Sure she does: This Inuit rocker, she's as tough as a Courtney Love-cooked steak. When Idlout hits the stage, she does so as the unshrinking front of an all-male, ruggedly capable band. Musically, as she demonstrates on her current national tour, she's all brawny guitar riffs and scowling vocals. But that's not the half of it. Idlout eats polar bears. It's true - she consumes the snow-white lugs, the big, furry playful beasts who are, you have to admit, totally cute. "They taste really cute, too," Idlout says, with a laugh. "They're delicious, in fact," she continues. "I don't mean to be so crass. You have to understand that hunting in the north is a way of life. It's not about carnage - it's based on survival." Carnage, survival - rock 'n' roll, anyone? Idlout, occupying a booth in a bar at a boutique hotel in Toronto, has her tattoos, straight black hair and a lean rocker's frame, but she's no rough girl. She's easygoing and has a killer scratchy laugh. "Oh really?" she cackles in surprise, when I mention her on-stage, um, swagger. She'd launched the album the night before with a sweaty set at a club a few blocks down the road from where she now relaxes with a beer on a sunny, lazy afternoon. The disc's music is straightforward; there's none of the odd shapes of her 2002 debut, E5-770: My Mother's Name. "I learned how to count in fours," she grins, referring to the common rock time signature. "It's pretty much rock 'n' roll for dummies." But Swagger's ambitions are not modest, and the album is not pretty; its stories, troubling. The darkly shimmering, 100-proof howl of Whisky Breath is about an alcohol-impaired relationship, and Belly Down is a harrowing blues about a big-city casualty. (Not autobiographical, by the way, says the Ottawa-raised woman who now splits her time between Toronto and Iqaluit). As for her songwriting, Idlout is no fancy-penned lyricist - "you can be so mean, acting like Jimmy Dean" - but she does know a bar-band hook when she comes across one. There's a tendency to view all Idlout's songs as some sort of reflections on life in the north. After all, E5-770 refers to the neck-tag number given to Idlout's mother in the 1940s by the Canadian government - traditional names being so tricky to southern tongues. "It made me angry," Idlout says of the practice, "but mostly it hurt my feelings that anyone would refer to my mom by anything other than her proper name." So, now you hear Lovely Irene, a chugging rocker with an evocative line about "high heels on a gravel road," and it could be about uneasy relationships in the North. Not so, though. "It doesn't matter where you are," counters Idlout, who wrote and recorded the album here, in Toronto. "Women are nurturing, loving, generally aiming to please their men, no matter what the expense. There's an absurdity in wearing high heels in gravel for the sake of a man who doesn't deserve you." Idlout has an iconic grandfather. Joseph Idlout was one of the Inuit hunters depicted on the back of a $2 bill, as well as the subject of books and films, including a 1990 documentary film Between Two Worlds, about lost identity. The hunter-guide's granddaughter, wearing a seal-fur jacket in a hipster's taproom, figures it's time to move back north, though. "People, not just friends and families, have been telling me that it's time for me to return home," she says. "I think they're right." Is she home-sick for a particular pastime, unique to the North? "It's a blast!" exclaims Idlout, when asked about "nudie snowmobiling" - riding in nothing but a smile. "In mid-May, the ocean is still frozen, but it's warm out, and the snow is soft. You should try it some time." Idlout, be assured, is not one of the stars of Nunavut Girls Gone Wild. But she'd be wilder if she could. "I wish I was born 200 years ago," she says. "I would have loved to be living the traditional life, with a pile of babies, in a camp, chewing seal skin - being a proper woman." Hmmm, chewing seal skin in the northern wild. Would we call that swagger? Maybe - it all depends on what world you're coming from. Lucie Idlout plays Ottawa's Zaphod Beeblebrox tonight; Calgary's Liberty Lounge, March 4; Vancouver's Biltmore Cabaret, March 6; Edmonton's Black Dog, March 7; and Canadian Music Week, Toronto, March 12.

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