When Cut Nose was sixteen years old, he left home. Home was the Great Lakes. Home was Sault Ste. Marie. This was in 1790. And he traveled to Minnesota and then to Manitoba.
Cut Nose was chief of his tribe. Twenty-seven years later, he signed a treaty. Was it his treaty to sign? What about the area’s prior inhabitants? No matter. They had all died. Small pox. It was his area now. And he signed. And he converted to Christianity. And Cut Nose became William King. Because Lord Selkirk served the Queen. And so he was a king. And so his sons were princes. And they became Princes. There would be many famous Princes: Henry Prince, Tommy Prince, William Prince.
And, if we are to read between the lines of Kovin Kestnar’s latest release, Messiah of Peguis, there is another prince that lurks among the band office: The prince of darkness. Who was jerking off in the closet with a shuriken scraping the meat of their perineum? Who looped a rope around their neck to satisfy their fetish for erotic asphyxiation? Whose peguisian perversion is endless, so long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the rivers flow? I haven’t the slightest idea. But someone must. And Kovin certainly does.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
