Algiers is here. Don't start the revolution without them.

"I guess you could trace it all the way back to growing up in the South: developing a structural critique of racism, and then looking back into history and understanding where that came from. I think what we wanted to reflect in our music — not even necessarily through the lyrics, but through the music itself — is this idea of time and memory collapsing upon one another. That's why the music extends in different directions, because our thoughts on history and society and violence and racism and capitalism extend in so many different directions.”

- Ryan Mahan, Algiers


It’s a commonplace that because of the complexities and vagaries of modern production and processing the typical consumer doesn’t know much about how the products they buy got to the shelf. 

The same is as true of music as it is meat. 

For Charlie Parker, Pablo Casals or Jerry Lee Lewis it was pretty simple. They rehearsed the material they intended to record, they and their fellow musicians showed up at the studio. The engineer placed a mic or two and futzed around until they got the best live sound they could. The musicians did a few takes, picked the best one, the producer decided whether to keep the ending or fade the track, the recording got mastered (mixing wasn’t much of an issue until the Sixties and four-track machines), the record was manufactured, sleeved and sent to the distributors and then the stores. The sound the listener heard was pretty much what the guys in the booth heard when the band was performing. 

You can still record that way, more or less. And some people do. Others take full advantage of the myriad and remarkable changes in recording and record making media. A track that starts on some guy’s computer in Atlanta can wind up tinkered with by another guy in New York who sends it to a guy in London, who adds other shit. And that’s just the recording process. We haven’t even factored in mixing or mastering. 

This exponential expansion of possibilities can also be an exponential expansion in the probabilities of music that sounds like a stew fucked with by too many cooks over too long a time tastes. 

Or … it can result in something that’s both a technological marvel and at the same time an organic, moving, powerful performance. Sometimes. The Underside of Power is such a sometime. 

Making music when the significant contributors are only occasionally in the same room requires a very modern kind of alchemy. It requires that people who may have started in separate books all windup on the same page of a single volume. Algiers are a band that practically defines the virtues of this modern idiom. 

Three friends. Not your usual punk derelicts, dropouts, or whatever. Rather, they are three post-baccalaureate pals from Atlanta who, despite drifting off to other places and other callings, remained joined by a certain musical energy. They communicated music, and played it together when they convened. Gradually, they became a band. A look at their principal responsibilities would make the novice think we had the standard two guitarists and a bassist setup, at least with their first album, which used primarily drum programming as opposed to the live thing. That would be misleading, however. 

A look at the credits for their juggernaut second album The Underside of Power reveals that each member of the band plays a variety of instruments. Lee Tesche may be the guitarist of record, so to speak, and Ryan Mahan the bassist, but you can never be sure exactly who’s playing what. Singer Franklin James Fisher is a multi-instrumentalist, too; and all of them contribute drum programming and synthesizer parts. With this album they also have a ‘real’ drummer in Matt Tong, late of the Bloc Party, who’s a powerhouse. He too contributes electronics of various sorts as well as trap work. 

Whatever their methods, Algiers’ unity of purpose and vision makes for some powerful, poignant music. The Underside of Power is music for our times made by a band for our times, multi-racial, multi-national, and … sorry Stephen Miller .. altogether cosmopolitan. 

Underside is united in theme and purpose. It’s a document of both reflection and outrage. Recorded in the U.S. and the U.K. during the former’s presidential election season and the latter’s Brexit vote, the realities of fascism, racism and police brutality shadow Underside’s every beat. Adrian Utley of Portishead and Ali Chant did most of the production in their home city of Bristol, also home of agit-punk muckrakers the Idles. The modern dystopia is heavy on the minds of both bands, as it is with many of us. 

The album commences with the barely distinguishable words of the late Black Panther Fred Hampton before spiraling into a threnody called “Walk Like a Panther.” It sounds like Afrika Bambaatta and Trent Reznor in a crash course with some futuristic goth horror soundtrack. It’s more overture than song, and it segues into two of the album’s best tracks. 

“Cry of the Martyrs” is a dance floor anthem for Black Lives Matter. Righteously funky, driving, full of guitar abrasion and electronic menace. The title cut is ecstatic gospel for a revolution to come (“I’ve seen the underside of power, and it’s a game that can’t go on”), both tracks sound like Norman Whitfield tracks with a new electronic twist Franklin’s vocals, shades of Dennis Edwards of the Tempts one minute, Barrence Whitfield the next, soar and carry these songs’ messages home. Franklin, despite his conscious cultivation of a just another fella in the band identity, is becoming a moving, powerful singer whose vocals move Algiers somewhere higher. 

“Now the hate keeps passing on” is repeated throughout “Death March,” its relentless, beastly groove something out of Keith Shocklee and the Bomb Squad. A Suicide style drone propels the lament of “Cleveland,” another Franklin showcase, complete with gospel singing samples auguring the return of the innocents of police slaughter. 

“Animals,” a punk-powered groove that never quits, finds Franklin sounding like Rob Tyner testifying with the MC5. “Animals” eventually dissolves into a howling crescendo of a finale. The dark beauty of “Hymn for an Average Man” provides a contrast, followed by the essentially instrumental “Bury Me Standing,” a monastic drone fit for 2017’s apocalyptic soundtrack.

Underside draws resolutely, not quietly, to a conclusion with “The Cycle/The Spiral: To Go Down Slowly.” With piano straight out of Sunday service, a howling Hendrix-ian guitar figure and Franklin proclaiming “we are the spiral to the end, we’ll fight the power,” echoing Public Enemy in their prime. Bloodied, but unbowed, Algiers going down, but not without a fight, much like the best of the generation they represent. Just as individuals of consciousness and conscience needed a soundtrack in the past, be it Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, or Public Enemy, the Clash or Rage Against the Machine, so does this generation. And synthesizing the musical materials of past and present eras, Algiers is a band for their time.