#mark cisneros

The album starts with “Boilermaker’s Notch,” all thrashing precision, the guitar mostly tamped to a tense grey rumble, but allowed to ring in bright, rainbow-colored power chords at the end of phrases. Wilson’s drumming is disruptive. He executes frantic, off-balance fills, then settles into a double-timed gallop. And MacKaye shouts short, koan-like couplets into a gaping void. “It’s ringing in my ear,” he finishes, and yeah, ours too, in the best possible way.

Hammered Hulls engages with issues in an oblique but feral way. “Rights and Reproduction” lurches through staccato thickets of guitar and bass, its refrain of “Permission requested…Permission denied,” a rallying cry amid thorny bursts of politically charged poetry. It’s got to be about Dobbs, but not in any direct way. The throb of Mary Timony’s bass near the end is like a migraine building, unbearably tense and confining.

The music is tight and driven, but it has its intervals of lyricism, where the guitar chords arc out anthemically and the barbed-wire starkness breaks for something akin to beauty. The guitar-slashing, drum bashing, bass pulsing breaks in “Needlepoint Tiger,” sound more like math-y post-rock than punk; they’re exciting and elevating. “Abstract City,” too, has a grand, enveloping surge; its instrumental sounds come in like a tide rolling in and up to your knees. MacKaye is mostly a barker, a ranter, a howler, but he has his moments of D. Boon-ish introspection, especially on the closer “Mission Statement.”

The point is that Hammered Hull can crank out a classic DC post-punk when it wants to, but it can do a lot of other things, too. Barbed wire and paranoia break for intervals of unexpected beauty—and vice versa. The lines are clean and the intensity undeniable.

Fisher’s voice is a commanding presence throughout, and the call-and-response construction of many of the songs provides a unifying motif. In the adrenaline-fueled rushes of “Something Wrong” and “Good Man,” the band rediscovers the power that made their first two albums so compelling. But it’s the engagement with collaborators that provides the most interesting moments. Rapper Big Rube calls for resistance over a minimal orchestra swell and massed distant voices on “As it Resounds”; billy woods and Backxwash speak directly to police violence and the manipulation of white grievance over a skittering drum machine and piano motif on “Bite Back.” Mark Cisneros ties the “Out Of Style Tragedy” of domestic weaponization to victory of political and financial self-interest as the band chants Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” in the background. Jae Matthews provides the female counterpoint to Fisher and Samuel T. Herring on the lacerating “I Can’t Stand It.” LaToya Kent speaks from the perspective of a black mother: “Burying her feelings with the men she bore to life/Her heart heavier than the body.”  On “An Echophonic Soul,” DeForrest Brown, Jr’s electronics and Patrick Shirioshi’s sax provide a keening background to an invocation of the other dead in the electric mist.

The record closes with Lee Bains III intoning, “When we die/The neighbors will bring casseroles/Drag shows will be held in our honor/… /The marchers in the boulevard will take their knee/Raise their fist/Drop their face/Silent in the midday traffic/Like a stone in a quick river/When we die, our beloved, our kinfolk/Fear not, we rise.” The song delivers a modicum of hope amid the bloodshed and culture war bullshit that drives it. At a time when black, female and queer lives and agency are being erased and their histories whitewashed, the diversity of voices and styles gives Shook astonishing power as an expression of possibility. Algiers may not have the answers but they’re damn sure asking the right questions. The material is here, heed the call.

As a sidenote, in January Queens producer King Vision Ultra released Shook World, a mix tape built on stems from Shook (supplied by Algiers) and his own sound archive featuring guests such as DJ Haram, ELUCID, Dreamcrusher and Dis Fig. It is envisioned as a companion piece rather than a remix, a conversation which broadens the scope of both records. It is well worth hearing and can be found here: https://algierstheband.bandcamp.com/album/shook-world-hosted-by-algiers