ALGIERS - Algiers

Record-industry hedonism needs albums like this to be cut down to size and called into question: the abandonment of militant music is one of the reasons behind the rift between audiences and musicians, a factor that has reduced music to a pure product, with a flight not just from consumption but from ideological models altogether.

Franklin James Fisher, Ryan Mahan and Lee Tesche, with their debut “Algiers”, arriving after six years of activity, turn back the clock on rock history — not to indulge in lost sounds or esoteric philosophies, but to tear away the veil of indolence that leaves rock music gasping for air, reviving that anti-capitalist, revolutionary fervour which, from blues to the avant-garde, by way of electronic music and pop, has been the purifying force of an art form increasingly prone to narcissism.

Situationism once again becomes the cultural engine of left-wing thought — not the institutionalized left fascinated by totalitarianism. Gospel and protest music recontextualize the past in the present, in an era where economic and social injustices are even more glaring and where the hand obstructing progress is not so easily seen.

Algiers' sonic revolution sets off again from the roots of blues and Black music, but feeds on all the variables that have preserved its popular roots throughout history.

It is in this 360-degree vision that the true fascination of Algiers' music lies, skilled as they are at citing disparate styles, with fragments that, put together, give rise to a sound that is original and well defined.

There's no sense that the trio recorded this album as the first building block of a career; if anything, the suspicion that this record might not have a follow-up looms large as you listen to it. The ten tracks open no dialogue or discourse — if anything they close it, sealing it with an anger we hadn't felt since the days of MC5 and Public Enemy, and with that sense of drama and human annihilation that the Bad Seeds first, and then Suicide, once tamed into the rock idiom.

Take "Black Eunuch" as an example: for a moment it sounds like 60s soul, before dub makes everything overflow into post-Suicide electronics, or the sonic tension of "Irony. Utility. Pretext.", an exemplary anti-pop track where the lyrics leave no room for compromise.

Musically, "Algiers" renews the roar of punk while giving itself over to gospel, which becomes an apocalyptic groove into which soul, industrial and cascades of synth are grafted.

Without aiming for a masterpiece, the album is a unique and overwhelming sonic experience in its authenticity. Franklin James Fisher sings as if Nick Cave had been born in Africa, or as if PJ Harvey were impersonating Nina Simone, dragging even the less fiery passages toward a purifying catharsis; on "Blood" he even seizes the graces of pop soul, scratching and shaking it the way you'd do with a spoiled child.

The handclaps and gospel choirs ("Remains"), the scraps of post-atomic blues ("But She Was Not Flying"), the raw sounds free of noise and wrapped in a claustrophobic atmosphere ("Claudette"), the electronic and industrial pollutions ("And When You Fall") and the militant, uncertain misstep of "Old Girl" all form a single whole, a take-it-or-leave-it where the overall result is more corrosive and significant than any of its individual fragments.

At times idiosyncratic, dark, tribal, hypnotic, even delicate and poetic in an almost conventional way ("Games"), "Algiers" is a sonic and ideological manifesto where Malcolm X and Alejandro Jodorowsky shake hands, an event you don't need an invitation to be part of.

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14/09/2015