OR   Search for Artist/Title    Advanced Search
 
you are not logged in...  [login] 
All Reviews    Edit This Review     
Review: 'ALGIERS'
'Shook'   

-  Label: 'Matador'
-  Genre: 'Indie' -  Release Date: '24th February 2023'

Our Rating:
The fourth album from this mixed-race band from Atlanta, Georgia burns with righteous anger towards the U.S. establishment.   

The seventeen politically charged tracks cover a wide remit embracing spoken word poems, field recordings, post-punk, R’n’B, alt-rap, 60s Motown, spiritual jazz and gospel soul. It’s a heady mix of styles but it works. To quote from the band’s website: “It’s a defiant, genre-eclipsing, technicolor, Atlanta front porch party”.

Singer Franklin J. Fisher says: “I like the idea that this record has taken you on a voyage but it begins and ends in Atlanta.” His powerful voice has echoes of Prince and Edwin Starr and conveys an eloquent rejection of the many state sanctioned injustices.

Apparently, the band were on the verge of breaking up prior to this release but ‘Shook’ feels and sounds like a fresh beginning and finds them (re-)born standing up and talking back.

The album features contributions from numerous guest artists including rapper and voice artist Big Rube, Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring, LaToya Kent (Mourning [A] BLKstar) and Rage Against The Machine’s Zack De La Rocha. As a consequence, the album itself seems like a form of community action affirming the right to open dissent and radical protest.

The messages may not be new but demands such as those for “freedom of the human soul regardless of race, creed or colour” (As It Resounds) are all the more powerful through being expressed with directness and passion.

The song Something Wrong? couldn’t be more topical in that its subject is the shameful (and often fatal) police policy of stopping black men without good cause and assuming guilt based solely on the colour of their skin.

Nevertheless, this is not an album of ready-made slogans or patronising sound bites. Instead, it is a lyrically sophisticated and poetic assault on capitalist values. As such, it is best heard with a lyric sheet in hand. If it has a fault it is that the intensity and density of the words are often buried in the mix and require repeated hearings to decipher. On the plus side,however, each listening reveals fresh strengths.

Overall, ‘Shook’ is a cutting edge comment on the state of the American nation right now. On top of this, as guitarist Lee Tesche comments, “It feels like the most Algiers record that we've ever made.”

Algiers’ website

  author: Martin Raybould

[Show all reviews for this Artist]

READERS COMMENTS    10 comments still available (max 10)    [Click here to add your own comments]

There are currently no comments...
----------



ALGIERS - Shook