Matt Tong, Algiers' elastic timekeeper, surrenders to the song
Listen to the opening minutes of Shook, the 2023 album by the Atlanta-born, transatlantically based, globally minded quartet Algiers, and you might wonder what's become of the drummer. For a song and a half, the only pulse is machine-made: first, a shopworn sample from "Subway Theme," the click-clack beat that raised the curtain on cult hip-hop film Wild Style in 1983; then, a spray of hi-hat artillery mined from Zambian rock but forged in the digital furnace of Ableton Live. It's only in the final 60 seconds of "Irreversible Damage" that sticks meet skins in real space: Following a verse from rap-rock warhorse Zack de la Rocha, the song's industrial rattle pivots to the loose double time of Mediterranean folk, and a cloud of bashed cymbals and swung toms rolls in, nudging those rigid intervals off the grid.
Matt Tong's fashionably late arrival to this party hits twice as hard for those who remember him from his old job. The British-born New York drummer introduced himself to the world in far splashier fashion with "" — the cannonballing opener from the 2005 debut by his previous band, — on which he builds from a faint murmur
