Algiers make the sort of albums that should come with reading lists, which is a great and terrible thing. The transatlantic experimental rock quartet care passionately about ideas, and their music’s ability to introduce those ideas, but they’re stranded in our age of excess. Everyone has less time to listen, we just want the new new, constant stimulation, infinite variety, or the same old, over and again. Algiers are difficult, unplaceable, a band that need sleevenotes and lyric sheets and longform narrative films, not a download link in a Whatsapp thread.
There Is No Year largely features cut-up ideas and phrases from lead singer Franklin James Fisher’s long poem Misophonia (meaning sounds that produce extremely negative reactions, like rotten ASMR). The poem isn’t great, but the music is as electrifying, unpredictable and chaotic as ever. It gets stranger and stronger towards the end, where Algiers’ gothic gospel funk finds the right balance of doomy melodrama, metallic Motown and floor-pounding post-punk. In a different timeline, they’d be on their fifth Peel session and first on the bill for the Nirvana tour, but here we are; we make the best of what we’re left with.
