Algiers - Cleveland

The last few weeks have exposed that racism, in its worst form, it's alive and kicking. Nazis and Ku-Kux-Klan members are marching in the streets, feeling empowered by a president that haven't condemn directly their attack and that encouraged them to hate those who are different to the privileged group with threats of bans and walls.

This demonstrations are the irrefutable proof of what the world refused to see but that millions of people experience on a daily basis: the hate for being black, for being muslim, for being homosexual, for being hispanic, for being jew, for being transgender... for not being a white heterosexual cisgender christian. And even if we want to believe in a civilized first world with equality, it's just a lie we tell ourselves (and above all, that people with power tell us) to make us believe that society works.

But this history of hate has never been interrupted, it has had big victories in theory, but in reality minorities keep feeling the oppressive effect of hate on them, in various forms from that spans from small micro-racist comments to violent attacks that have caused deaths. And this killing of people became something institutional: police officers killing people based on racial prejudice.

Mixing gospel, industrial noise and punk, Algiers, a band that starting with their name suggest a fight with colonialism, sublimate the deaths of so many black people in Cleveland, a ferocious piece of art that is an apocalyptic chant of denounce. The name of the track comes from a double meaning: echoing the hope in the gospel chants of James Cleveland, and as a reminder of the place where a black kid was killed by police officers for playing with a toy gun.

Franklin James Fisher's powerful voice goes reminding all the atrocities that has been committed against the black community by the law enforcement institutions, and then goes naming black people whose death has occurred in suspicious conditions and that the police has conveniently passed as suicide by hanging; the band is merciless and suggest an analogy between this deaths and the hangings committed by the Ku-Kux-Klan in the 60's.

The music is suffocating, recreating a mourning mass to remember those lives that have been lost by racial prejudice. Heavy drums accompany a gospel chorus to create a tense ambient that reaches it peak moment when the noise distortions are mixed with sound of people crying and screaming. That's what the grief sounds like. But Algiers want to ensure that people know this prophecy: "The day is coming soon, when we fill it full of dust and resurrect the truth". It plays with the gospel promise of the final judgment, but it also brings hope to the awareness that it's generated to change things and criminalize hate instead of criminalizing a race.