Ya Tseen’s Stand on My Shoulders sounds like waking up disoriented in someone else’s dream—voices drift in and out, shifting between languages, and the psych-rock haze never quite resolves into clarity. This is Nicholas Galanin’s design. Led by the multidisciplinary Tlingit/Unangax̂ artist, the album’s sound diffuses like smoke slipping through the grasp. Words on love and politics are whispered and rapped in English, Spanish, Yupik, and Tlingit, and a cast of guest vocalists rotate in and out, yet the mood never breaks. The effect recalls a piece of Galanin’s visual art, The Imaginary Indian (Arts and Crafts): a totem pole papered over to match the wall, like it’s starring in Garden State.
Where Ya Tseen’s first album, Indian Yard, bore more pop and R&B influence—echoing with subdued drums and sultry vocals from serpentwithfeet and Kelela—Stand on My Shoulders commits to a uniform mid-tempo pulse. If it runs the risk of becoming background ambiance for listeners seeking Indigenous art without confrontation, its refusal to generate rhythmic catharsis can also be read as an argument for sustained reflection. In Galanin’s mercifully direct lyrics, Native dream psychology layers over intimate portrayals of kinship. The driving rock guitars and layered vocal textures recall TV on the Radio’s experimentation, and Galanin shares certain vocal and political affinities with Moses Sumney. But where Sumney’s work finds refusal in queer aromantic isolation, Galanin employs kinship—particularly romance—as a bulwark against the settler state.
“Dei Kee Tla Tin” (“To be on a high point and look far out to sea”)—named for his father, blues guitarist Dave Galanin (1955-2021)—demonstrates the power of this technique. Over fingerpicked guitar and ethereal harmonies, Galanin places a recording of his father describing his own artistic lineage. The light instrumentation creates space for Dave’s voice to reverberate across generations—kinship as a survival practice and a sacred obligation. With this song, Galanin makes his intent clear: Stand on My Shoulders is carrying forward what ancestors made possible. Other songs, like “Twilight” and “I’ve Known,” channel the melancholic intimacy of Sufjan Stevens or the rock sensibility of Blood Orange, but here some of Galanin’s romantic language doesn’t feel direct so much as generic. Lines like, “I don’t want to wake up/How did we get here?” risk universalizing what should remain specific: love as Indigenous futurity.
The album’s opener, “Ircenrraat,” borrows from Yupik legend—the term refers to little people living in another dimension, beings both amazing and scary. Galanin sings of dreamwalkers speaking unfettered, perhaps imagining Native people free to speak their minds: scary and amazing to settler colonists. “Ixwsiteen (I See You)” and “Katlian’s Hammer” offer the album’s most direct political confrontation: The former’s “A pig that won’t sleep/A pig that just eats” invokes Black Power Movement lexicon for police, while the latter reanimates the Tlingít war chief Katlian, who wielded a blacksmith’s hammer against Russian colonial forces in the 1804 Battle of Sitka. This is protest music rooted in historical defiance, though Galanin’s whispered vocals and the album’s placid pace imply distance rather than the reckoning demanded by a song like Snotty Nose Rez Kids’ “Long Hair Don’t Care.” Perhaps this is a strategic refusal of the performance expected from Indigenous protest music, a rejection of the urgency that white audiences demand from political art. Or perhaps it’s an unresolved tension in the work: How does one call to arms through a dream?
As Chicano Batman revere love, drugs, and land, Ya Tseen prioritizes atmosphere, but the varied voices of the collaborators on Stand on My Shoulders don’t always clarify the vision. Portugal. the Man, one of Alaska’s most prominent bands, is again a tentpole feature, lending their radio-ready pop-funk to “Taste on My Lips,” also featuring singers Meshell Ndegeocello and Sidibe—who probably didn’t imagine they’d wind up in such comically Washed Out-in-Portlandia territory. Pink Siifu appears briefly, then dissipates into the album’s dreamlike drift. The stronger collaborations lean into sensuality: Sidibe’s R&B coo and *Jahon Mikal’s sybaritic delivery accentuate the love songs, and Anel Figueroa’s Spanish refrains add warmth and texture. These moments offer relief from anticolonial intensity, a better exchange of emotional stakes for atmosphere.
Stand on My Shoulders enacts resistance through relationality—its title gesturing toward Galanin’s father, its collaborations insisting on collective voice. The unsparing lyrics of “Ixwsiteen” and “Katlian’s Hammer” refuse the passivity their sanguine instrumentals might otherwise suggest, and “Dei Klee Tla Tim”’s mixture of the personal and political is compelling. Resistance doesn’t always announce itself with a raised fist; sometimes it whispers, and when Galanin is whispering alone, it works. When everyone’s whispering at once, though, it gets harder to hear. The features feel like wallpaper over substance—I keep wanting to peel them back to reveal Galanin’s voice underneath, the way that totem pole demands to be seen through its camouflage. Whether it’s strategic refusal or diffusion of purpose, Stand on My Shoulders is most interesting when it resists the impulse to universalize.
