I can’t think of a better title than “Shook” to summarize what you are going to find in the new work of the Americans Algiers. Because if there is something that this collection of 17 songs achieves, it is to shake you until you are left sounding on the canvas without knowing where they have rained hosts like bread from you.
Franklin James Fisher, Lee Tesche, Ryan Mahan and Matt Tong have tightened the strings of their music, raising the tension to levels that can sometimes even be suffocating. They have taken their powerful raw-rock to give it a few twists based on rap, soul, gospel, punk and jazz fusion in a sort of psychotic shaker that is difficult to assimilate at first, but that hooks and hooks endlessly.
Few are those who better represent the spirit of conveniently modernized Seventies Detroit-rock, despite being originally from Atlanta. Few are those who know how to endow their lyrics with the rage combined with the enormous residue of blackness of their music -now yes- originally from Georgia.
“Shook” It is a marvelous album in the combination of a palette of sounds that goes from the schizoid to the electro, condensing a few decades of music in just one of its cuts. You just have to listen to the opening with “Everbody Shatter” and its glorious continuation with “Irreversible Damage” to realize it. In the first, the rapper Big Rube and his call to resistance leave his most rabid mark. In the second it is a recovered Zach De La Rocha who reminds us of the essentials of the RATM legacy. But things don’t end there and the record unfolds with a variety of registers as astonishing as it is frantic.
“Shook” It can be said very loudly, it is the best album of Algiers although it is also the most convoluted and the best example that they continue to raise their bar without really knowing where their ceiling is. The album is a perfect summary of the complicated times that we have had to live. Dark times that need more than ever the hope of fighting inequalities, ignorance, stupidity and manipulation. Times that require a call to the revolution of ideas. Un turn off the fucking tik-tok and think for yourself. A crida not to fall into despair despite police violence and institutional racism that contaminates everything.
“Shook” It can be condensed in the hard verse of the no less brutal due to its intense “Bite Back” when Franklin James Fisher says and repeats: “bite the hand that feeds you if it’s poison”.