Welcome to AMMSA.COM, the news archive website for our family of Indigenous news publications.

Our Pick: D.M. Lafortune: Beauty and Hard Times

Author

Review by K. Kanten

Volume

30

Issue

11

Year

2013

Artist—D.M. Lafortune

Song—Minuet  For the Staircase Children

Album—Beauty and Hard Times

Year—2012

This is one of those albums that is surprising because of the depth of the content, both lyrically and musically. D.M. is the phonetic spelling of Diem Lafortune, who is clearly a poet, a singer and a musician. The music is a marriage of both Aboriginal culture and human experiences with a variety of mainstream music styles such as folk, blues, some rock and even Celtic compositions including waltzes and even a little jig. The songs are paintings of a variety of lives and people, in a form that is rare except from an artist that is both matured and at their creative peak. One can only guess how long Diem took to refine the telling of these stories in song. The space for this review cannot begin to share the themes of these songs other than to say the music composition is up to meeting the needed vehicle to relay them to us. Fortunately Diem has a cast of qualified musicians who play all manner of instruments that weave the threads of this musical tapestry. From one song to the next, some are complex in musical layers while others keep a simplicity that compliments their subject matter most effectively. As many hard times that are shared in the lifetime struggles within these stories, they truly make the sum of the true beauty real lives are, as well as being an overall musical master piece that will demand you listen to this album over and over before you truly comprehend how good it really is.