Algiers – Shook

Algiers’ initial underlying sonic palette, the marrying of jagged post-punk sonics with a firebrand gospel delivery, has mutated over the last decade into a broader, more industrially infused mix. On Shook, their fourth full-length, they expand even further, most noticeably incorporating a more consciously jazz and hip-hop influence.

There are great swathes of it that really work. Bite Back uses billy woods and Backxwash to great effect, letting both of their wildly differing flows shine, while still managing to finish in a typically grand, full-blooded Algiers fashion. Out of Style Tragedy is seemingly every genre they’ve ever been influenced by all at once. It's a spoken word piece atop an increasing chaos of scrambling backing vocals, rattling live drums and a Mark Cisneros guitar part that is both pretty and disquieting, along with a hundred other ingredients in the mix that add up to possibly the album’s finest moment.

However, parts of the record have a self consciousness or mimicry to them that stops them from feeling like much more than pastiches. Cleanse Your Guilt Here has an unusually underplayed vocal performance from Franklin James Fisher, but it’s over the top of what feels like a lazy impression of a dusty 90s hip-hop beat. Too often the album feels like a case of enacting genres rather than letting their influence seep in. It leaves the record feeling like a grab bag of ideas, some of which have been polished to brilliance, others of which haven’t been fully realised. There’s clearly a great album in there, just one that never quite gets the momentum to show itself. 

Listen to: Bite Back, Out of Style Tragedy, 73%