There have been no lack of colorful terms used to describe life in a post-Trump world. Take your pick: “horror show,” “shit show,” “nightmare,” “dumpster fire,” “end times,” and so on. The debut album from Montreal-based visual artist-turned-electronic-pop provocateur Alexandra Mackenzie—a.k.a. Petra Glynt—offers a different take: To her, it’s all a trip. (And judging by the phantasmagoric nature of both her illustrations and music, it’s safe to assume the hallucinogenic interpretation applies here.) “Trip” is a word that hits with the same visceral impact as those mentioned above, yet it doesn’t quite carry the same apocalyptic connotations. Trips can certainly be frightening and traumatic, rendering the world before your eyes as something horrible and grotesque. But, if you can keep your shit together, they ultimately do come to an end, and their most turbulent stretches can be more easily navigated with a supportive guide at your side looking out for your well-being.
Throughout This Trip, Mackenize assumes the mantle of Pied Piper, leading us through this waking nightmare toward the light. It’s a role she’s accustomed to—activism and community have always been central to her music and art. A product of the same experimental Toronto scene that yielded fellow avant-pop radical Lido Pimienta, Mackenzie approaches performance as if preparing for war—against patriarchy, against environmental neglect, against austerity economics. Bathed in intensely psychedelic projections, she’ll lay down thundering rhythm tracks using a floor tom and loop them through pedals, before layering on distorted, disorienting electronics in rhythmic swells. And then she unleashes her most powerful weapon of all: a striking, sonorous, opera-schooled voice that’s part stern school headmaster, part veteran soul diva. On strident early tracks like “Sour Paradise” and “Of This Land,” that voice had to bust through the surrounding clamor with the force of a battering ram in order to get their eco-conscious invectives across. They were the sort of songs that, 40 years ago, you could imagine being belted out by a hippie busker trying to get the attention of aloof white-collared businessmen on their way to work. But Mackenzie’s music can’t help but reflect the manic, sensory-overloaded nature of 21st-century life, and her voice is the blaring megaphone that modern protest music requires.
This Trip’s title-track centerpiece actually dates back a few years, long before Trumpism became an American epidemic. However, at the time, Canada was being weighed down by its own political albatross. Sure, these days, Canada’s universal healthcare system, copious arts funding, and hunky prime minister can make the place seem like a socialist utopia compared to the U.S. But from 2006 to 2015, the country was headed by Stephen Harper, a staunch conservative whose divisive rhetoric, disregard for the marginalized, and single-minded belief in economy over environment provided a sort of soft-launch/focus-group teaser of the turmoil currently infecting the U.S. During Harper’s final year in office, Mackenzie released “Murder,” a slow-burning cauldron of bilious spite and barely contained rage directed at the prime minister. But “This Trip,” written around the same time, feels like the response track where dispiriting anger gives way to tangible action. Atop a vibrating bed of bass, Mackenzie admits, “It’s easy to wander, to waver under thunder/Sink further underwater.” So she uses everything at her disposal—from intensifying 808 clatter to gospelized call-and-response refrains to heart-throttling techno—to ensure that doesn’t happen.
The fact that “This Trip” can now be easily applied to the political strife festering beyond her country’s border is oddly emblematic of Mackenzie’s own burgeoning ambitions. The new album complements Mackenzie’s DIY productions with mixes by Damian Taylor, whose credits include the Killers, Björk, and the Prodigy (as well as some acts closer to Mackenzie’s immediate circle, like Austra and Doldrums). Though built from her trusty toolkit of drums and drones, the recordings rebuild Mackenzie’s wall of sound as a three-dimensional space, bringing greater definition to her melodies and encouraging more subtly soulful vocal performances to better harness the juddering energy of rattling bangers like “Fell in a Hole.” A handful of these tracks surfaced in rawer form on Bandcamp or on label compilations over the past couple of years, and the differences are substantial. In its original form, “This You Need” drowned its tropical thrust in waves of disembodied voices, with Glynt frantically reading out a list of demands (“I don’t want to just with anyone/But with everyone!”) as if she were about to get swept up in the tide. On the finely chiseled, beat-heavy version that closes out This Trip, those words become the song’s climactic, rabble-rousing mantra.
The production here also emphasizes a quality that could sometimes get obscured in Mackenzie’s sonic assault: joy. Through the R&B-rubbed “Propaganda” and finger-snapped, heart-racing rush of “Up to the People,” Mackenzie envisions her protests as street parties: “How many of us are scared shitless?” she asks on the latter track, not to amplify our anxieties, but alleviate them, by summoning collective strength to overcome existential fear. And nowhere is that process more explicit than on the album’s most epic, dramatic track, “The Cold.” Over the course of almost six slow-roiling minutes, Mackenzie uses her breathy vocals to thaw the song’s icy surface and her jittering drum sticks to break the pieces away, revealing the beating proletariat heart that’s been frozen by the numbing despair these times engender. As the song’s blood-pumping beat gets harder and stronger, we’re hearing more than a simple quiet-to-loud crescendo—it’s the sound of Mackenzie mobilizing her army one thump at a time.
