Sister Ray's 'Communion' Is a Love Letter to Nuance
In a world that is increasingly pushing us toward the ease of black and white, Sister Ray reminds us that nuance is exhilarating and, in most instances, preferable.
Nuance is exactly what music is meant to evoke — that feeling of not quite being able to put your finger on what you're trying to articulate. The sense that you can only feel something. Sometimes, you can only say it in song. It's what music exists for and Sister Ray makes fine work of accessing this tool to navigate the most tender and confusing feelings, finding a way to say what the rest of us can't — about breaking up, about moving on, and about the muted sorrow that follows you through the process of finding newness.
"There are these big ideas that I had. But it's also really about the smallest ones and the little, minute, tiny moments that open up. Some of the smallest moments for me are some of the most universal," they share.
Those small moments of truth are the ones that make you want to at times rewrite your own personal history to match a simple and preferable black and white way of viewing your past and understanding your present. But integrity won't typically let you off that easily. Integrity is at the core of Communion's themes. It means recognizing the sinking feeling of considering the role you play in your own suffering — evident in one of the album's standout tracks, "Visions" with the lyrics, "You could call it crawling back / I would say I'm devotional to lust like that." Sister Ray describes the catharsis of diving into the grey area, "What gave me a lot of relief was looking at myself in an unfavorable way."
And while heartbreak is full of unending nuance, Sister Ray's work doesn't become so preoccupied with the process of breaking up that it misses other opportunities to explore tension in our greater world. Communion dives into the intricacies embodied within their existence as an Indigenous artist who has a sometimes loving, sometimes fraught relationship with the Catholic church. It's another instance where it would be easier to rewrite one's own personal history.
"I was really fond of going to church, I don't have church trauma," shares Sister Ray, which they admit conflicts with the recently underscored history of abuse enabled by the church against Indigenous people through the residential school system. But within the church itself, Sister Ray found her earliest examples of juxtaposition. "It's so beautiful, but it's such a violent, brutal imagery around you all the time. And, I love that. The dichotomy in that space, or the way that it juxtaposes itself," they say. These musings find their way into tracks "Justice" and "Good News."
We so often run from subtleties in our current world — anxious to pick a side and make a statement. But Communion's beauty is in embracing the nuance and creating dramatic tension. In doing so, it creates a body of work for one to reference when you can't quite find the words to say how you're feeling. It puts sound to complex feeling.
Listen to Communion.
