Algiers have released new single ‘Cleveland’, taken from their forthcoming second album, The Underside Of Power, released Friday 23rd June. Listen below.
While the song invokes Tamir Rice, as a reference and tribute, the lyrics summon Kindra Chapman, Andre Jones, Lennon Lacy, Sandra Bland, Roosevelt Pernell, Keith Warren and Alfred Wright, similarly victims of state sanctioned violence. It also makes a link with theorist Walter Benjamin’s work on divine violence, placing justice against the law, wherein the American legal system is complicit in the murder and enslavement of oppressed people.
Frontman and lyricist Franklin James Fisher says “I wanted the song to sound like the Final Judgement in the Bible, wherein the wicked are judged and condemned by the righteous with all the “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” of the damned when justice is finally realised. This translates in the “solo” section of the song. It consists of various recordings of people inconsolably crying and weeping while the guitar and lead vocal mirror their contortions. If you’ve ever witnessed something like that in real life, sound of a person’s sorrow is equal parts frightening and musical.”
Listen / purchase ‘Cleveland’: https://remotecontrol.lnk.to/Cleveland
