Algiers: Communing With The Ghosts of Pop on 'The Underside of Power'

Photo: Dustin Condren

Drop the needle on Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted and Black and you’ll also find yourself in the room with the song's composers, Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine, as well as its inspiration: the playwright Lorraine Hansberry. You’ll hear notes that accompanied the civil rights movement in America, words that rose in throats alongside spirituals and folk songs dating back decades. That’s pop music: a conversation between past and present. It’s the chance to commune with ghosts.

That idea is right at the heart of Algiers’ new record, ‘The Underside of Power’. In truth, it’s right at the heart of everything they do. There are countless echoes in their work, both musical and political, that they make sure we hear.

The Atlanta-raised-but-based-all-over group’s self-titled debut, released by Matador in 2015, introduced a thunderous brew of post-punk, soul and gospel held together by effervescent performances and a stout refusal to allow their complex sound to descend entirely into chaos. Since the band’s inception, Franklin James Fisher, Ryan Mahan and Lee Tesche’s compositions have bridged form and meaning in a manner that a lot of their peers are reluctant to entertain.

“Lee and I were talking about this last week,” Fisher says, crammed into a corner of the tiny backstage space at London’s Shacklewell Arms. “If you are able to marry those things together successfully, then you've created a really good song. Like a really good pop song. Blood [a single from ‘Algiers’] is an example of that.

“You're talking about the lost gains of ancestral struggle in the face of neoliberalism and capitalism and you're using sounds of the ghosts of the people whose efforts were squandered. It's the background for the content. You have that abstracted guitar so mainlined that the notes are irrelevant almost. [Jimi] Hendrix did this a lot in a way that I myself am not able to do, but Lee is able to do.”

This idea of transcendental sound is important. On 'The Underside of Power' Algiers acknowledge the lineage of their influences but do away with their chronological ties, giving in to a stylistic decision when it works. That’s how you end up with a song like the title track, which sounds like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ The Night being fed through a no wave filter.

“Four Tops and Suicide, what do those have in common?” Tesche says. “I think it's a really singular thread: urban environment, Detroit, motor city, car factories, girl groups, Motown, Northern Soul into Detroit electro. It's a thread. [With] Suicide referencing early '60s R&B and rock 'n' roll, it makes so much sense to our ears.”

Fisher picks up the train of thought. “Once people understand art in general, particularly 20th century, as a series of continuations or reactions against what happened before it,” he says, pausing briefly. “Then you are able to bypass the blinders that are imposed by this capitalist system, which created the idea of genre so that things can be marketed.”

As a whole, ‘The Underside of Power’ is concerned with societal structures and oppression, with Cleveland’s recounting of state sanctioned violence against people of colour sharing the floor with Death March’s stark refrain: “This is how the hate keeps passing on.”

The record opens with Walk Like a Panther and a sample from a speech by Fred Hampton, who was an increasingly influential voice in the Black Panthers when he was killed by police in Chicago at the age of 21 in 1969. Algiers posit his death alongside the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by Cleveland police in 2014 and the Black Lives Matter movement. The sample repeats twice: this is still happening.

“This is my own take on it,” Fisher says. “None of these things are very difficult concepts to grasp. It’s just what’s moral and knowing the difference between right and wrong. Even if you subscribe to any sort of traditional religious idea, all of these things draw a line in the sand between what you should do and what you shouldn’t do. If you stand up for what is right, oftentimes they’ll get you for it. The death Hampton faced was very, very real. But that can also be symbolic. A defeat of any sort, the wiping out of whatever it is you’re striving for. These days you face it over and over.”

He starts banging on the flight case acting as a table in the middle of the room, giving his words a percussive weight. “It’s blatantly, patently wrong what they did,” he says. “It’s a pattern that has become more visible in the eyes of the country and the eyes of the world thanks to technology. But it’s been happening forever. How many other cases like Tamir Rice are there that nobody knows about?”

The title track’s lyrics - about the power of solidarity in the face of institutional force - are similarly despairing, but within there are kernels of hope. Eventually, its majestic chorus carries them aloft. It’s a moment when the power of a pop song as a means of communication becomes readily apparent and also a fine example of a piece of music standing firm against outside pressures by answering them with something beautiful. Written in separate segments by Tesche and Mahan and later fused at Fisher’s urging, The Underside of Power drives home the importance of dialogue in the band’s writing, but it also hints at the mutual respect and friction that drove the record’s creation.

Put together at multiple locations with a raft of producers and mixers from different musical backgrounds - Portishead’s Adrian Utley, Ben Greenberg of Uniform and the Men, drone-metal experimentalist Randall Dunn - ‘The Underside of Power’ was a difficult beast to understand, both inside and outside of the band. For the first time Algiers wrestled with the idea of working with ‘name’ producers, having recorded their debut with a friend, Tom Morris, and they also had to learn how to be hard-nosed when it came to their vision for the songs. Add to that the arrival of drummer Matt Tong, known for his work behind the kit with Bloc Party, and they had some straightening out to do before everything made sense.

“From my perspective, we still have that little bit of southernness where we're quite congenial,” Mahan says. “It can be tough for us to be assertive if we don't have a really strong relationship with people. So it was more about learning how to do that in a short period of time with new songs that not everyone was familiar with. Sometimes, Frank and I would get physically frustrated or a little bit anxious about things. We would leave, and Lee would be left in there to do his crazy fucking noise. He could've made like four noise records while we were out of the studio.

"But we're on the same page. Even if we're not on the same page, we're on the same page. We all toast each other in where we want to go as a band. But people from the outside? It's difficult to wrap your head around what we're doing and where we want to go with these songs. Some of these demos sounded quite different to the last record. So people were taking them in different directions and then you have some people who maybe want to take it somewhere else. It's difficult when you take our music somewhere else. We've always tried to express that as clearly as we can. If you take it one slight turn left or right it might go somewhere that nobody wants to go.”

Mahan’s aside about Tesche’s studio meandering is an interesting one. On stage later that night he’s less a guitarist and more a conductor of wild, thrashing sounds. As beautiful as Fisher’s melodies are, as instantly satisfying as Mahan’s walking bass can be, he’s always got an abrasive answer to hand. When he discusses his bandmates’ frustrations he comes at the situation from another angle, saying that those gaps in the process allowed him to fully embrace and take ownership of the new material.

“You guys had a hard time because it was letting go of the things you did,” he says. “All of a sudden it was my chance to try on your boilersuit and your leather jacket [and] get inside these songs. I was like, ‘Cool, I'm one of the guys now’. It was a really exciting period for me. While you were having difficulties it gave me an opportunity to become really attached to the material. I was trying to guide it somewhere.”

That penny would drop at different times for the record’s other contributors, but Fisher, Mahan and Tesche all point to Greenberg’s influence as fundamental to that happening. The producer entered the fray late in the piece and, with time and money running out, helped to crystallise the band’s vision and make sense of their work to that point.

“In this situation the entire band wasn't on the same level with these songs in terms of ownership until we were able to do things the way we're used to doing them,” Fisher says. “Which is getting into a room where we can dictate what needs to be done with somebody who knew more than we did. That's where we found Ben, who was really responsible for reintroducing these songs to us. That was the moment of epiphany for us. It's right up there with working with Adrian to be honest. It's one of the best experiences, musically, I've ever had.”

Mahan agrees. “We learned that a lot of this is about relationships,” he says. “We were naive, we're still new. Even though we've been playing music forever, we're still naive in a lot of ways. You forget how important relationships are.”

Tesche’s largely the quiet man of the trio tonight, but his words have a way of connecting with the heart of the matter. “That's the biggest part of it,” he says. “I learned that too. Ninety percent of producing and engineering is psychology and it’s 10% technical. It's making you feel comfortable with your stuff and making you feel confident.”

Packed together on stage at the Shacklewell Arms - a venue they have not previously played despite their long association with London - that confidence is writ large. The new songs are muscular, sometimes intimidatingly physical as Tesche drops to the floor in pursuit of another shard of noise, but also delicate and uplifting. Excised from their beginnings and their recording, they take on new meaning for the band and an audience packed shoulder to sweat-soaked shoulder.

Algiers don’t see their performance as an act of protest, but at times it feels that way. Backed by a banner from the Underside of Power video that reads ‘All power to the people’ and on stage roughly 24 hours before the polls close in a spectacularly divisive UK general election, this feels like a rare moment of solidarity.

“The act of reiterating collectivity is as subversive as it possibly can be,” Mahan says. “We’re being told by neoliberalism and someone like Theresa May that we need to be concerned with our individual security rather than what we can do together. And that’s a basic point. That’s what you can pull from gospel, that’s what you can pull from fuckin’ punk rock. There are conflicts and divisions in any scene, in any society, but at the same time...let’s get together.”

'The Underside of Power' is out on June 23 through Matador.

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