The Halluci Nation | Cartel Madras | The Killers | Lingua Ignota
Formalizing the declaration of A
Tribe Called Red’s 2016 album We Are the Halluci Nation by adopting it as their new name, the Halluci Nation ride again, speakers and decks set for One More Saturday Night.
If We Are the Halluci Nation was the boundary-leaping sound of a group uniting a global network of actors and voices, One More Saturday Night is about sustaining those connections while imagining opportunities for future growth and new interventions.
It makes just as much sense for the group to be in dialogue with a defiant country anthem as it does for them to get down with Haviah Mighty and Odario on a Caribana love-in. Dancehall and reggaeton’s influence is woven deep into this album’s tapestry, strutting dembow syncopations lending thrust and swagger to standout tracks like “Tanokumbia,” “Land Back” and “The OG.” Both “NDN Kars” and “Ba Na Na” are the result of a shared class consciousness — an acknowledgment of diaspora and a defiant effort to lessen its distancing.
Where much of dance music is about abandon,
One More Saturday Night is necessarily entangled in additional abandonment. The trauma of colonialism is ongoing, so when the 2018 soundbite from former NDP MP and Cree lawmaker Romeo Saganash’s parliamentary truth bomb about Justin Trudeau (“Why doesn’t the prime minister just say the truth and tell Indigenous peoples that he doesn’t give a fuck about their rights?”) drops deep into the album on 2019 track “The OG,” it feels just as skewering as it is imbued with new resonance, especially after Saganash doubled down on his words in a March 2021 interview with APTN.
The Halluci Nation don’t shoulder the responsibility of solving the predicaments of capital-indebted culture. Instead, they task themselves with facilitating collective dreaming, jamming records full with collaborators or connecting multiple generations on a single track (on “Mother Mother,” elder dub poet Lillian Allen meets bars from Gitxsan emcee the Northwest Kid and a scorching Afropunk blues meltdown from SATE). The Halluci Nation don’t have to offer solutions to the predicaments of colonialism because they already existed for millennia before interference. But what this album does concede is that there’s no reason to stop dancing together, and the Halluci Nation will be there to provide the beat. (Independent)