#2 | Algiers ‎– Algiers | Matador Records

The debut LP by Algiers is haunted by promises of the past: the
rapturous call and response of millenarian gospel, the bellowing urgency
of 60s protest soul, the scene-searching intensity of DC hardcore and
the smeared viscosity of post-punk and no wave. After all, as Marx once
said: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brains of the living.” But rather than revel in a state of
nostalgia, the band wields these burdened visions to charge headlong
into the future.

Over the album’s eleven tracks, these three émigrés of the American
Deep South lay waste to appropriators, oppressors, revivalists and the
cultural shock troops of capitalism. Vocalist Franklin James Fisher’s
every shriek and incantation will take you from the sweaty fervor of
Dennis Edwards-era Temptations through the righteous rebellion of Nina
Simone to the solitary midnight howls of PJ Harvey. Shards of Lee
Tesche’s guitar, along with Ryan Mahan’s bass pulses and synthesizer
slashes, pierce through the processional, transforming neo-modernist
hymns with explosions of foreboding and dread that evoke the vanguard of
pop experimentation from Suicide to Roland S. Howard.

In an era when political subjectivity and human connectivity have
been smashed to pieces by the demands of finance capital, Algiers has
taken its stance: to maintain fidelity to these subversive spirits and
trudge toward the light. While they may never arrive at their
destination – consigned to a life of wandering – they conjure the dead
sound to life in frightening new directions.