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Algiers: battling alienation with song

ALGIERS with BELIEFS and GREEN RAYS at the Horseshoe (370 Queen West), Thursday (October 8), doors 9 pm. $13. rotate.com, soundscapesmusic.com, ticketfly.com. See listing.


Many musicians, from the popular to the obscure, have expressed dissatisfaction at the current state of affairs: economic and racial inequality and a careerist mindset that long ago infected the music world.

Algiers’s blistering blend of post-punk riffs, gospel melodies and austere drum-machine rhythms isn’t just a visceral reflection of the prevailing political realities, but a necessary outlet for ideas that seem increasingly unwelcome in other sectors.

Bassist Ryan Mahan, vocalist/guitarist Franklin James Fisher and guitarist Lee Tesche are friends from Atlanta but have since scattered. Tesche and Mahan live in London, Fisher in New York. They wrote and recorded their 2015 self-titled debut remotely, swapping files and emailing ideas and references back and forth.

During that time, Fisher was working on the trading floor of an investment bank and poured all the estrangement he felt into lyrics that reference post-colonial struggles, racial and structural violence and personal grief.

“There were, like, 500 televisions tuned to CNBC 24 hours a day,” he says over the phone from a hotel room in Santa Cruz. “They were always taking any global event and boiling it down to economic issues. That type of shit. It was really alienating, so I started writing as a venting process.”

The song Blood’s lyric about “your television coma” bluntly references that time, while But She Was Not Flying grapples with Fisher’s frustration about the unsolved murder of his friend, an event that happened when Fisher was young.

Meanwhile, Mahan and Tesche were in London soaking up the harsher side of the city’s electronic music scene. All three share a love of proto-punk and synth-led horror film scores, and as they recorded, the drum machine became an anchoring force.

That was partly a stylistic choice: Algiers wanted to make music that was both intellectually and physically stimulating.

But it was also a necessity. Although Bloc Party drummer Matt Tong has since joined Algiers on tour and will likely be on future recordings, this record’s use of drum machine reflects their specific circumstances.

“If we lived in the same city and had a practice space in the suburbs, our sound might be different,” says Tesche. “Being forced to work in an urban environment forces you to integrate electronics elements a lot more just because of space or the lack of it.”

Separation had other benefits.

“When everybody is living in different places, you get to bypass the obstacles that ego usually causes in a so-called typical band set-up,” says Fisher. “Somebody writes a riff and expects you to react to it immediately, you’re expected to say something even if it’s not true, and then it balloons into this layer cake of awkwardness.”

Much of the media coverage of Algiers has focused on Fisher’s full-throttle, gospel-inflected vocals, and while the band doesn’t shy away from their southern roots, they’re weary of being pegged as a southern act.

Both Mahan and Fisher talk at length about their interest in electronic music, composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and film soundtracks by Bernard Herrmann.

“A lot of people focus on the fact that we’re children of the U.S. South, as if it’s some particular ethnic identity that can’t be transcended,” says Mahan. “With the electronic elements, it’s just part of our wider experience growing up.”

The tour marks the first time in a while the band has spent an extended period of time together, and Fisher likens the performances to a post-church or post-coital “cleansing.”

“I can never really sing properly unless we’re all playing together. It turns into a really interesting – almost spiritual – experience.

“A lot of that has to do with the physical act of singing, especially if you sing very hard, because you get light headed. You’re onstage, so there’s a rush from that. You’re playing with your best friends, so you get a rush from that. Then there’s the entire philosophical act of commemorating people when you’re singing. That’s exactly what happens when we play these songs.”

Despite the red-blooded rage permeating the lyrics, the band isn’t completely pessismistic about the political landscape. Mahan studied comparative politics at the London School of Economics and works for an NGO in the British capital. He believes NGOs are filling the space of politics as neoliberalist agendas erode government institutions, political parties and grassroots movements. And he points to Jeremy Corbyn’s recent election as British Labour Party leader by a 59.5 per cent landslide vote as cause for optimism. 

Musically, he cites politically potent hip-hop acts like Kendrick Lamar and Jay Electronica, and punk bands like Perfect Pussy, as proof that dissatisfaction is not genre-specific.

“Music provides a space to deal with grief, to deal with memory, to deal with the fact that artistic and political movements have been sup-pressed – or have failed to a degree – and to make sense of that,” says Mahan. “A space to engage in a project that goes some way toward taking suppressed social histories and throwing them back out into the ether.”    

kevinr@nowtoronto.com | @kevinritchie

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