With tender strength, Maten mixes his Innu roots with modern, uninhibited folk-rock.

A detail is sometimes enough to give momentum to a record. On Utenat (the city), it is the choirs that raise Nitepuatauat, a piece judiciously chosen to open this fourth album by Maten, an Innu rock group from Mani-utenam, on the North Shore. In addition to seducing the ear on the spot, these mixed voices symbolize what makes the strength of the new songs of the trio formed by Samuel Piette, Kim Fontaine and Mathieu McKenzie: the spirit of collaboration.

On the opening track, Maten notably invited his Atikamekw friends from the Black Bear group, from Manawan. Here and there, it’s Shauit and Scott-Pien Picard (both Innu from Mani-utenam), Beatrice Deer (an Inuk from Nunavik) and even the Senegalese Elage Diouf (on Ueshama) who we hear, in addition to a host of other friends and relatives of the trio. Each one brings its color, its emotional charge.

This openness to others can also be heard in the music. Maten finds support in a folk-rock sometimes tinged with country memories, but here extends his universe to a more modern rock thanks to slippery or voluntary basses, drums freed from binary rhythms, atmospheric work that nothing flashy. And all this without losing what roots him in the Innu culture.

Utenat is a multiple disc where groove (Ueshama) rubs shoulders with delicately epic folk-pop (Uitamu), lively stripped down indie rock (Tshika ui pishikun) and where traditional singing is judiciously integrated. These songs rendered by a star team (Alain Quirion, Réjean Bouchard, Joe Grass, Jean-François Bélanger, among others, surround the guys from Maten) are about hope, love and looking back – to ask advice from elders , in particular — to better bridge the future. This disc is carried by a tender force.