Electric Religious Invites You To His Métis Disco Party
Brandon Baker’s latest offering fuses Indigenous rhythms with inexhaustible funk.
By Khagan Aslanov
Photo by Levi Manchak
- Published on
One of the first things Brandon Baker remembers is laying in a guitar case, curled up in its velvet lining, while his father played for him. This small, tender moment became the inception of a lifelong love and pursuit of music as a calling and career. From a very young age, he showed a pinpointed focus on making it as a musician.
Baker’s latest, The Taste, released under the moniker of Electric Religious, is another winsome notch in a lifework full of various recording projects. Sitting in his home studio, Baker seems utterly in his element, taking the time to speak to RANGE before heading off on an extended tour of Japan.
“I gave myself a goal: 15 years. If I don’t have the life I want in 15 years, I will still have time to go and try something else,” Baker says, eyeing the first Fender amp his parents bought him that still sits, modest and reliable, among a wall of sleek, modern recording tech. With that goal in mind, he set off on his path.
After a few years of talent shows, music camps, and accompanying his brother’s fiddle act, he started the Brandon Baker Trio, a funk-tinged rock band that gradually made its way from being a covers act to writing their own songs. These first original creations lit a spark that never went out. The obsession with funk stuck around as well, even as the projects changed names, shapes, and styles.
Somewhere down that path, Baker found himself in the Haven Social Club, a now-defunct independent music venue in Edmonton. There, he met Olivia Street, who, at the time, had her own band called King of Foxes. Ever since then, the two have been partners, in life, music, business, and, as of 2015, parenthood. As a team, the two have released six albums between their separate projects, along with countless co-writing credits.
This all brings us to The Taste, a swirl of dizzying dance pop that Electric Religious has branded as Métis Disco. His coined genre label represents an amalgam of Indigenous rhythms and modalities, as well as the hard-hitting four-on-the-floor funk stylings of disco.
“Obviously dance music is a thing, but I had to be true to myself in certain ways,” he says. “All of it harkens back to the fiddle, to Métis culture, to dancing and jigging.”
For Electric Religious, the beauty of disco also lies in the safe space it quickly became for minorities and the LGBTQ community, almost naturally phasing into a realm where everyone could come and dance and simply be welcome.
The Taste also sports some incredible cameos from electro-pop’s upper echelons. Omar Hakim, whose percussion has thrust some of the best work by D’Angelo, Madonna, and Daft Punk up the bracket, plays on two songs from the record, as does Kenny Aronoff, who has toured and recorded with just about everyone, including the Smashing Pumpkins and Bob Seger. Riwo Theo Egor, lead vocalist of Edmonton’s own afro-fusion band Melafrique, also makes an appearance.
It may feel strange to associate genres like funk, disco, and pop, styles that traditionally carry unabashed feel-good affectations, to the persistent inequity and loss that traverse Indigenous culture in Canada. For an artist like Baker, however, the impact and complexity of Métis identity has no choice but to loom heavily over the project. It is to Baker’s credit that he was able to imbue his new album’s infectious disco grooves with potent projections of Indigenous culture, as people, survivors, and musical innovators.
The Taste drops July 26 via Red Music Rising
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