Algiers at Terminal West, Atlanta, September 22, 2015

The Atlanta-based Algiers have been on constant tour since we saw their first homecoming show at The Earl last June, and last night their tour brought them back through Atlanta for a performance at Terminal West.  Opening were home-grown dub-conscious hip-hop band The Difference Machine.

The difference in The Difference Machine was their use of a powerhouse live drummer to give the rhythm an urgency and propulsion beyond the metronomic time-keeping of a beat box or sample.  Their set was loud and powerful, and a great start to the evening.

It was a little harder to decipher Bambara, the next act of stage.  Frontman Reid Bateh opened the set by layering some looped vocal sounds into an atmospheric melody, and then quickly erased any memory of those sounds with crunching garage-punk guitar and impassioned  vocals.  There was plenty of snarl and lots of punk attitude, but the vocals were difficult to hear over the guitar, and why begin a set like Julianna Barwick if you're going to otherwise play like The Black Lips?     

Algiers somehow manage to combine post-punk guitar with gospel influenced vocals and radical politics and make the whole combination not only palatable but exciting and enjoyable.  Atlanta's Creative Loafing noted that Algiers recognized "the complementary struggles of gospel’s radical black roots and punk’s anti-capitalist spirit," and praised them for "finding the overlapping points between noise, gospel music, and punk rock. The trio reaches deep within these forms to evoke the revolutionary ideals absent from more commercial music."

Here's a taste of that music, the cut that drew the first blood that got me into this band. 

We were electrified by their performance last summer at The Earl, and on repeat, the show lost none of its originality, electricity, or urgency. 

Frontman Franklin James Fisher is a natural entertainer, who can sing convincingly about the anguish discussed by the Black Lives Matter movement one moment and then spin on his heels like a 1970s Philadelphia soul  crooner the next, and then blanket the composition in a cloud of shoegaze pedal effects.  

Algiers have assumed from The Clash the mantle of The Only Band That Matters, and writing in Noisey, Zachary Lipez lamented:

I want badly for them to be the biggest band in the world, and they’ve been selling out dates on their just finished tour, but I’m generally wrong about everything and what I love turns to dust and anyway they are too black, too white, too politically and sonically knotty, too weird for the straights/not weird enough for willful eccentric, and just too damn good to survive. RIP Algiers. It was a grand couple months. Hope Matador cuts you a nice check from the Pavement reissues. Or maybe they’ll be fine. Because, despite their enormous grab bag of influences, more than enough for an entire new genre let alone one solitary band, Algiers don’t sound like anybody. That’s a worrisome proposition in the rock landscape of 2015, where pastiche is king and kingdom. How will Algiers survive in America, if you get what I’m saying.