algiers

Rock, punk, metal, country, improv, world, noise, and more: What our editors dug during this eclectic year in music, and their most-anticipated albums of 2018.

There must be zombies! Despite dire predictions in 2017 about the death of the electric guitar, they were spotted all over the musical landscapeā€”whether in the hands of lions of the instrument, like John McLaughlin, who played his last tour, and Annie Clark, or in the seemingly unlikely mitts of pop idols like Harry Styles and Kesha.

Our editors own choices for the yearā€™s coolest albums were equally eclectic, if consistently more 6-string centric. Metal, country, punk, jazz, blues, rock, roots, noise, experimental, and world music were all part of our gangā€™s 2017 smorgasbord of soundā€”with very little overlap. The Zep-drunk Greta Van Fleet were the sole double-up among our picks, and Neil Young and Robert Plant were the only representatives of the classic-rock camp on our in-house ā€œhitā€ list.

Otherwise, as we at Premier Guitar look forward toward a bright (and gear filled!) 2018 and wish you and those you love much happiness, join us in celebrating some of the best music of 2017. Maybe youā€™ll discover a few new artists youā€™d like to hear. Thereā€™s certainly many among our favorites who arenā€™t household namesā€”yet. Or maybe youā€™ll see a few glaring omissions. Either way, read on and be sure to share your own picks for the yearā€™s greatest music in the comments section.

TED DROZDOWSKIā€”SENIOR EDITOR

Reeves Gabrels
Imaginary Friends Live

In which Gabrels rewrites the rock guitar bible in 11 live performances packed with so much invention itā€™s head spinning. I was at Nashvilleā€™s Family Wash the night this set was recorded, but it wasnā€™t until I heard it here that my mind was entirely blown by the former Bowie/current Cure axe-destroyerā€™s execution. Every song is packed with ā€œholy fuckā€ qualities: epic tones, killer riffs, brilliantly tossed-off fills and digressions, and solos that soothe, stun, and drip with lysergic intelligence. Raw and impeccable at the same time. If you dig rock guitar that straddles the trad and the rad with absolute authority, this is an essential album. No bullshit!


Chelsea Wolfe
Hiss Spun

Thanks to PG contributor David Von Bader for turning me on to the psychedelic universe of Chelsea Wolfe. I love everything about this album, from Wolfeā€™s dramatic post-Diamanda Galas singing to the storm clouds of guitar that hover above her Caligari-esque compositional landscape. It helps that Queens of the Stone Ageā€™s Troy Van Leeuwen adds stunning outbursts of guitar, but heā€™s only a guest in a world of Wolfeā€™s imagining. And itā€™s one hell of a place, with Everests of ephemera balanced by passages as heavy as Hephaestusā€™ hammer. Wolfe is a guitarist and conceptualist to be reckoned with.


Mark ā€œPorkchopā€ Holder
Let It Slide

Iā€™ve spent a lot of time in the dirty alt-blues trenches, so this album hits home. Itā€™s raw, powerful, and demandingā€”a sonic demon breathing fresh, searing air into a largely stale, deflated genre. Holder is a badass who conjures the joys and menace of the corporal world artfully. Iā€™m mostly over hearing traditional blues covers on new recordings, but Holder and crewā€™s version of ā€œStagger Leeā€ is a beast. It sounds like a vintage Black Sabbath cut, but meaner. Holderā€™s scorched-earth slide playingā€”mostly on baritoneā€”is distinctive and relentlessly nasty. And their live shows have more blood and guts than a slaughterhouse. Catch them on perpetual tour.

Most-anticipated 2018 releases: Jim Campilongo Live at Rockwood Music Hall, Jack White, My Bloody Valentine.

Wish list: Tom Waits, Tool.

TESSA JEFFERSā€”MANAGING EDITOR

Greta Van Fleet
From the Fires

When I first heard this young band from Frankenmuth, Michigan, two words popped into my head: ā€œLed Zeppelin.ā€ Heck, I thought for sure they were British! Once you get past the feeling that they sound too familiar, because they undoubtedly do, it really doesnā€™t matter. This band of 18- and 21-year-olds is fucking incredible. Itā€™s not surprising all their U.S. dates sold out in advance in 2017. These lads possess something special that the world (at least any world worth living in, in my opinion) will always crave: talent, soul, and passion. With this trifecta carrying them to the top of the charts, the quartetā€”made up of three brothers and a drummerā€”are winning over starving rock fans in droves. From frontman Josh Kiszkaā€™s first mountaintop ā€œYeeeeeaaaaaaahā€ to the precocious guitar riffs and solos of his twin brother Jake Kiszka, that are never trite, this double EP is about feel. When I fall for a piece of music, I simply donā€™t overthink it, because itā€™s time to jam.


Algiers
The Underside of Power

The opening track of this intense, neo-soul rock record is called ā€œWalk Like a Panther,ā€ and includes a sample of a speech by the late Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton. In the world we live in now, ā€œsigns of the timesā€ politically potent music isnā€™t rare, but Algiersā€™ musical benchmarks and deviations are. The fire-and-brimstone songs play tug-of-war between street-punk and church, with aggressive guitar riffs, Motown pop vibes, gospel-tinged cries of rebellion (delivered powerfully by frontman Franklin James Fisher), dark bass lines, and even a bit of electro-trance. Guitarist Lee Tesche says growing up in Atlanta influenced Algiers in many ways, from exposure to ā€™90s hip-hop to having the space for garage bands and tons of instruments, of which a smorgasbord is used on this record. Fisher, Tesche, and bassist Ryan Mahan met in high school, moved to foreign countries, got graduate degrees, saw the world, and then reunited to make music again. Joined by Matt Tong (Bloc Party) on drums, they made a stylistically schizophrenic sophomore album thatā€™s unlike anything else in 2017.

Most-anticipated 2018 release: Greta Van Fleet.

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Algiers is an experimental rock-soul band from Atlanta, Georgia. Members are, from left to right: drummer Matt Tong, bassist Ryan Mahan, guitarist Lee Tesche, and guitarist/frontman Franklin James Fisher.
Photo by Dustin Condren

The punk-gospel rockers share tricks for getting killer guitar sounds, and discuss whatā€™s brewing on their thematically potent, musically heavy new album, The Underside of Power.

In the late ā€™00s, Franklin James Fisher, overeducated with his masterā€™s degree, took a job at a Manhattan nightclub. While working in the coat-check room, he made good and efficient use of his time, channeling the sounds of drunkenness into song lyrics. Fisher set these lyrics to music in Algiers, a lean and powerful band that takes cues as much from politics and literature as from gospel and punk.

Algiers released a self-titled debut in 2015, but the groupā€™s roots go back much further. Fisher and two of his bandmatesā€”bassist Ryan Mahan and guitarist Lee Tescheā€”first played music together in the mid-1990s, when they met as high school students in suburban Atlanta.

Though years later Fisher, Mahan, and Tesche found themselves living in three different countries while pursuing graduate degrees. They maintained their collaboration through file sharing and through a shared collection of influencesā€”musical, literary, and philosophicalā€”on Tumblr.

On Algiersā€™ sophomore release, The Underside of Power, the group is joined by Bloc Partyā€™s Matt Tong on drums. The album is dark and urgent and is clearly, as the name suggests, a response to the current political climate, touching on the sense of oppression and dystopia that many are feeling.

But regardless of your political orientation, the album has a lot to recommend to guitar fansā€”killer riffs galore, with all kinds of uncanny textures and oddness percolating beneath the surface.

Via conference call from their respective homes in New York and Atlanta, Fisher and Tesche had a lot to say about their methods and benchmarks.

Youā€™re both products of Atlanta. How has that impacted your music?
Franklin James Fisher:
It was probably different for both of us. I remember always romanticizing these other places and other music scenes, like in New York and the U.K. It wasnā€™t until I left Atlanta that I was able to look back at it from a different perspective and kind of appreciate a lot of things that were going onā€”things that over the last 20 or so years I wasnā€™t so privy to.

I think also about the opportunity it gave us, growing up in a place where thereā€™s a lot of space, because it kind of dictated the music we made. It was really easy to be in a full band with drums, and play in peopleā€™s garages and basements. You could have seven members and play a lot of different instruments and have two drum kits and all this stuff, because the space allowed for it, whereas you move to a bigger city and you must be economical with how you approach things.

Lee Tesche: Growing up in Atlanta in the ā€™90s, the hip-hop and stuff here obviously had an influence on us. At the same time, we were looking at some of the music scenes we grew up listening to as well, like in Bristol, in the U.K. A lot of that ā€™90s hip-hop stuff was coming out, with people combining these ideas with guitars and full-band instrumentation with sampling and beat-making, throwing all this stuff into a blender and sometimes ending up with really exciting results.

Fisher: Itā€™s definitely a combination of those two aspects: making that impact on what youā€™re doing depending on where you are and whatā€™s going on at the time. Itā€™s definitely an issue of space and your immediate surroundings. When youā€™re younger it may have to do more with how you access music and whatā€™s going on with where you are.

But it plays increasingly less of a part as we enter this newā€”I hate the term but, global village or whateverā€”with the internet. I was hanging out with Randall Dunn, who mixed the record. He was talking about how they donā€™t have these scenes anymore in different cities, because thereā€™s no localized music scenes that just kind of exist in one pocket or another. Everythingā€™s kind of been homogenized by the internet. Internet seems to be shorthand for capitalism. Thatā€™s really what it is.


The Underside of Power was largely written in minor keys. ā€œRyan [Mahan, bassist] talks about a sense of melancholy, a sadness thatā€™s embedded in the bandā€™s ethos and one we try to communicate,ā€ says Franklin James Fisher. ā€œThereā€™s sort of an unofficial mandate in the band that we canā€™t really do major-key songs.ā€

Talk about the gospel influence on your sound. Does it come from first-hand participation in the church?
Fisher: For me, it does. Not really for the other guys. It took a long time for me to try and find my voice, as it were. In the early days, Ryan [Mahan] and I would put songs together and we would both try singing on them. It took a while to get right. Eventually he told me to just kind of approach it in the most natural way that I could, and for me that was just kind ofā€¦. I have a very loud voice and really was imitating what I heard in church and what I heard from Motown and soul records and things like that.

It was just like shouting, scream-singing almost. And then when we first demoed [2015ā€™s] ā€œBlack Eunuch,ā€ I think we felt as if we touched upon a nerve there. It was an interesting combination of punk aesthetics and gospel aesthetics and there was a synergy. So we started kind of playing with that. That was much more featured on that first record and I think a lot of people could tell just because theyā€™re strange bedfellows.

Tesche: For me, rhythm and blues and gospel and jazz are the bedrock of everything. Everything thatā€™s come in the last 50 years sprung forth from that, so itā€™s not that alien a thing to have these reference points in your music. I feel all the British Invasion stuff I discovered as a teenager, and getting into my parentsā€™ old soul and Motown and doo-wop and gospel stuff, gave me kind of a belief system, in a sense.

What about that punk-rock influence on your music?
Tesche:
I think the punk-rock reference is a great one to bring up, because as a teenager that was something that also came to me. When I was 14 a friendā€™s older brother played in a hardcore band, and I saw them play downtown [in Atlanta] at one of the dingy, dive-y clubs. Iā€™d never experienced anything like that before. It was this big sing-along. I was like, ā€œI want to be part of this.ā€ It just changed my entire musical outlook, and I think for me itā€™s always just been about maintaining that, remembering what music is and where it comes from and what expression is, and not being afraid of that.

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