Actually it is completely the wrong place. You should hear Algiers in a hangar in the middle of the night, with the fires burning in the metalltunnor and a huge crowd ready to be uppeldad to the revolution, or forays.
it is, as it sounds. As something much more and bigger than just a band. As a part of some dystopian movie, where everything is unfolding against a backdrop of distant cacophony, with the echoes of voices and plåtslamrigt noise.
how Algiers to get all his music on stage. They are the only four. And sure, a lot of lives in the loops, röstsamplingar and electronic records. But the striking impression is still the opposite: how very much of all this as the four members actually in front of the live in the moment.
They come from Atlanta in the us southern states, but has its hemmahörighet in New York and London. And any attempt to sum up their music easily becomes a long list of genres and influences. From the ancient gospel and work songs to the music and experimental electronica. With an activist in the middle, which sometimes manages to sing as if we were in fact listening on any old style of The Four Tops or The Temptations.
but with the texts who want to be academic pamphlets on the constitution of power-relations, then, rather than easily digestible kärleksrefränger. With titles like “Irony. Utlity. Pretext.” or “The cycle of The spiral: Time to go down slowly”.
It is a too much package, how you angle it, and Algiers do not do much to Polish away the joints or dampen noise. Yet they manage to play their music so that it meets, bolts and swings in a way that feels almost obvious. Fast, restless, concentrated.
kaosbeats, sometimes an old postpunkband, the differences are smaller than one might think and as a red thread through everything is Franklin James Fisher’s raw R&B tune, with the scent of both the preacher as the agitator.
They have spoken of his great admiration for Nina Simone, and maybe it is a kind of key, at least embodied the she as much of both the political people and the diverse musical traditions – albeit without the same alert levels.
But in the middle of it all is actually a shade of irony, too, that when the bassist Ryan Mahan explains, ”we have merchandise in the corner for the overthrow of the capitalist economy”. Before the ”Black eunuch” to end it all with an irresistible uppstressat gospelbeat and a text in which the marching lots carries scissors in their hands.
Read more music reviews of Nils Hansson , for example, how The Embassy barely resisting at all anymore .
