Deeply political and fiercely defiant, The Underside of Power is part album, part call to action. It grieves and rages in equal measure as it dissects the black experience of the contemporary West – in a decidedly literary fashion. At the same time it stretches far beyond the musical boundaries of post-punk, marking out Algiers as something special.

Central themes of racial and class divisions are introduced in the urgent fuzz of opening track ‘Walk Like A Panther’, beginning with part of a speech by Fred Hampton, the activist and revolutionary Black Panther, assassinated by police in 1969. The song is loaded with violent imagery that grabs the attention – words and phrases like “murder”, “led to slaughter”, “final execution”, stand out from the primal clatter alongside some that highlight class struggle, such as “rise up” and “hand of the people”.

Rhetorically this establishes The Underside of Power as a protest record, but sonically it’s misleading. The sense of fury does bubble under the entire album, but only on the opener and later on in ‘Animals’, a full on attack on Trump’s politics, does the soundscape mirror the subject so narrowly. Across the rest of the album, this anger is far more nuanced and musically explorative. Yes, the meat of the band’s sound comes from distorted guitars and hammering drums but, as a hybrid band, they’re no strangers to synths and samples diving in to whatever sound they need to illustrate their point.

Single ‘The Underside of Power’, for example, draws on early r’n’b, Motown and jumprock, with its epic harmonies highlighting institutional racism while taking the listener back to the public racial tension of the time. Likewise the gospel tradition is used throughout the album to imply a sense of impending judgement, while evoking church music’s part in the civil rights struggle. ‘Cleveland’, for example, takes a gospel sample – a very dramatic one – as its central part. The mood here is all fire and brimstone, as befits the most direct and powerful treatment of racial violence on the album – this song seethes, listing young black victims of police violence in America, among them 12 year old Tamir Rice. Its chorus is a full on angry wail and, to give it full force, the song is interspersed with real screams and cries of grief. It’s an intense and powerful communication of the outrage felt by the black community at the shooting in Cleveland, Ohio in 2014.

It’s not the only part of the album where masters-educated frontman Franklin James Fisher is able to conjure and communicate powerful images like this. Take the skipping-record beat of ‘Hymn For An Average Man’, intended to mirror “the recurring nightmare of the fascist”, or ‘Cry of the Martyrs’, written from the perspective of a revolutionary who has seen his movement fail – a despairing message, which hints at the helplessness felt by all on the underside of power.

In a rare playful moment, ‘Death March’ captures the ghoulish character of Italian horror cinema, by which it was inspired. It’s a highlight of the album, where tribal funk and gothic groove are explored with the theatricality of MJ’s ‘Thriller’, as the zombie/infection metaphor is extended to suit Algiers’ message on politics and consumerism.

What’s perhaps most impressive about this album is not just its message, but the gravity and sensitivity with which they’ve conveyed it. The Underside of Power communicates anger, but also sorrow, and despair, in a way which has the power to devastate, and musically gives the band space to come into their own – which they have, in spectacular fashion.
Ben Noble

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