Algiers
Shook
(MATADOR)
No one could ever accuse soul-punk group Algiers of lacking passion. For 10 years now, the Atlanta quartet-centered on the baritone roar of vocalist Franklin James Fisher-have fired off stern polemics against societal injustices and the people who ensure their persistence and have set out to expose The Underside of Power. Yet they've often struggled with marrying this passion with precision, their finished products unable to fulfill the revolutionary ideas behind them. On 2020's There Is No Year, the issue was a lack of ferocity as their more polished rock approach too often tended toward the inoffensive. On their newest album, Shook—a 17-track undertaking featuring the notable talents of Zack De La Rocha, Dungeon Family's Big Rube, rappers billy woods and Backxwash, and a “whole cloud of witnesses…clamoring for freedom”—the issue is quite the opposite: a tumultuous lack of clarity.
While special care is paid to the demolitionist sounds and textures that fill Algiers’ dense and thunderous forests-the way a cicada call is sampled and mixed on “Momentary,” for example, is unsettling in the best way-the same care isn't always applied to their arrangements. Occasionally, Algiers is locked in, like on “A Good Man,” a self-effacing punk rocker filled with furious drums, squawking guitar lines, booming riffs, and a stellar performance from Fisher. More often than not, however, songs like “Something Wrong,” which begins with a heavy dub-referencing funk beat before getting a DJ Screw treatment and then transforming into a punk screamer, become unwieldy and you forget where you've started by the time you reach the song's end. The message is lost in the cacophony. One gets the vaguest sense that Shook is meant to inspire hope in the face of despair. Unfortunately, that hope is intangible for the majority of the album's runtime. (www.algierstheband.com)
By Chris Thiessen
Bodywash
I Held the Shape While I Could
(LIGHT ORGAN)
In the nine years since meeting, Rosie Long Decter and Chris Steward have seen their college band Bodywash bloom into a Montreal dream pop outfit, blending subtle shades of hazy indie-rock and lush shoegaze into a four track EP and eventually, a debut album, 2019's Comforter. Their sophomore album, I Held the Shape While I Could, pushes the wistful, languid approach that typified their sound to the edges of noise rock, offering inkier riffs and piles of fuzzed out squall amidst lyrics of loss and renewal.
While the work as a whole sees the band leaning more heavily on electronic breakbeats and synths that pulsate and hum, it remains tethered to alt-rock swirls ot feedback and static. Opener “In As Far” begins the album with a sense of stillness and expectancy, with Decter's feathery vocals drifting in and out of layers of reverb before dissolving into the diffused dream pop of the following track, “Picture Of.” Much of the record follows a similar pattern—ambient and abstract walls of washed-out sound ebb and flow between gentle, suspended synths and moments of driving grunge and grit.
The tracklist jumps from sunny, floating melodies to murkier, more brooding territory from one song to the next, and it's this erratic pacing that stops I Held the Shape While I Could from being fully engaging. Songs such as “Sterilizer” and “Massif Central” bring faster tempos and more charged atmospheres to an otherwise unhurried set of songs, but they fall short of elevating the dips in tempo and energy that pepper the album. And rather than construct thematic arcs, the lyrics take the form of abstract sketches and opaque moments, more wandering and vague than meaningful. I Held the Shape While I Could proves that Bodywash has potential, if their sound continues to ripen as it has over the years. (www.bodywashmtl.bandcamp.com)
By Michelle Dalarossa
Indigo De Souza
All of This Will End
(SADDLE CREEK)
There's a bravery to Indigo De Souza's songwriting that is becoming more clear with each album: it's the nakedness of emotion. De Souza never hides behind or obscures her message, she states it plainly and openly and allows you to come along for the ride (or not). Not that there's a lack of poetry in
