![]() (Many of the songs use prepared guitar, a technique in which the instrument is outfitted with foreign objects to produce strange and percussive noises.) The sounds in Algiers’ songs are at once alienating and familiar, and a statement in and of themselves. ![]() Lee Tesche’s guitar doesn’t so much sing as it hisses, rumbles and shrieks. The songs are built around samples of Fisher’s voice, a mournful gospel chorus that, thanks to the distortive effects of technology, seems to rise like a ghost from an ancestral grave. So drown in entertainment/ ‘Cause all our blood is in vain.”Īlgiers’ music tells a similar story to their lyrics. Deciding who is fit to go out and die/ And who is black enough to be left behind.” In “Blood,” slavery is just another violent historical legacy to which a media-obsessed culture turns an apathetic eye: “Four hundred years of torture/ Four hundred years a slave. ![]() In the foreboding “But She Was Not Flying,” racism is part and parcel of a democracy poisoned by capitalism: “There’s a lizard with a human face/ He says he’s standing for democracy. “Growing up in the South and being told of our history and then seeing it laid bare before us, in segregation and racial violence and racism, being privy to those direct forms of racism, obviously has an impact,” says Mahan.Īlgiers depict racial prejudice not as simple bigotry but as something more insidious, a symptom of a broken system. There are links to writings by the African-American novelist and critic James Baldwin and articles about the Black Panthers alongside photographs of admired musicians, from John Cage to Kim Gordon to Nina Simone. The band’s Tumblr account is a collage of critical race theory and anti-capitalist musings. Maybe an acceptance, but also a willingness to say that despite all this we’re still going to push towards some future.”Īnyone familiar with Algiers’ music will be unsurprised at a casual reference to a French existentialist’s novel about a plague that nearly destroys a city. And the fact that you got to the end of the world, but rather than eating each other alive, like we’re told will happen if capitalism collapsed, there’s a sense of humanity that emerges, a sense of common shared recognition of this grief, of this ending. You know, one of the books that really touched me when I was younger was ‘The Plague’ by Albert Camus. “History tells us that, for most people on this earth, it’s a very sad existence, in terms of political experience and livelihoods,” says bassist Ryan Mahan. Pretext.”: “You put your hand out to shake/ And they export you in chains.” But pervasive throughout Algiers’s self-titled debut is a sense of anguish, an unwillingness to look away from pain or cloak it in uplifting platitudes. ![]() He almost seems to spit with rage in the song “Irony. 17.) Vocalist Franklin James Fisher sings with raspy defiance, by turns livid and mournful. (They perform at Brighton Music Hall in Allston on Sept. The group, whose three members hail from Atlanta and now live in London and New York, makes protest music rooted in gospel and punk. The most radical thing about the political rock band Algiers may be their ability to manifest grief. (Courtesy) This article is more than 7 years old.
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