Savages - Adore Life

Post-punk rarely comes across as an embrace as well as an open call to arms. But on Savages’ second record, Adore Life, the ten urgent, taut songs are equally determined to snap us out of our revelry, while also challenging listeners to find love where we can and make the world a better place in the process.

While 2013’s Silence Yourself was filled with untamed, strident anthems of assertion and incisiveness, Adore Life is far more seductive in both its convictions and its potency. The intimate lure of connection lingers fitfully beneath the churning pulse of these dynamic new tracks, which shake you awake as well as whisper in your ear. “Is it human to adore life?” questions singer Jehnny Beth on the record’s sprawling emotional centerpiece, “Adore.” By the end of the record, Savages have left little doubt that love is indeed the answer, and that they are unquestionably the best rock band in the world. Throughout Adore Life, the quartet seems intent on breaking free of the nagging conventional confines of the studio. Their sound and their message is bigger than four mere walls can contain, and the songs take on the raw, expansive quality of a live set that frequently hits full boil. The group – featuring Beth, guitarist Gemma Thompson, bassist Ayse Hassan, and drummer Fay Milton – decamped to New York City during January 2016 to run through and refine their material during a series of nine riotous club shows. And that transformative experience helped the group sharpen these songs into the ten venomous arrows that they have collectively aimed at your heart as well as your head. Just don’t flinch or the prick could prove to be lethal.

Savages – Fuckers/Dream Baby Dream

Almost a year to the day after Savages excellent 2013 debut album, ‘Silence Yourself’, and with no follow-up in sight, the band decided to mark the occasion by releasing this live twelve-inch featuring an incendiary live recording of Savages’ vicious, anthemic non-album track Fuckers, written during the sessions for Silence Yourself. The record captures the full sonic intensity of Savages’ live performance on the progressively wigged-out, 10-minute-plus Fuckers, as well as their mesmeric side on a cover of Suicide’s timeless Dream Baby Dream. Some new material would have been nice, but as a snapshot of this stage of Savages’ career, this is a pretty decent artefact. The recordings from The Forum are good, the instruments and vocals sharp and the live power of the band is captured as well as live recordings ever manage to do. As ever, brilliant bassist Ayse Hassan carries the songs along while the spiteful Gemma Thompson throws petrol into the flames to feed the conflagration. Vocalist Jehnny Beth is a master of the pained, us-against-the-world vocal, while Fay Milton crashes plenty of metal without going off the rails. Savages were at the top of their game as a potent live force; I just hope that during their current four year break, they are not burying themselves too deeply in a hole of their own making. The best way to show the fuckers is to soar and not to hide behind the barricades screaming in defiance. Blow them away. Something massive next, please.

Silence Yourself

Plenty of bands have resuscitated post-punk throughout the 2000s and 2010s, but few have done so with the passion that reverberates through Savages' debut album, Silence Yourself. The band's early singles drew favourable comparisons to Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, and a host of other strong female acts with post-punk roots, and the entire album burns with the same kind of confrontational fire those older artists had, which somewhat paradoxically, makes Savages sound particularly refreshing compared to many of their more blasé contemporaries. Yet Silence Yourself is also an emphatic declaration of independence that is reflected in the band's approach to making music (they paid to make it with their own money and splashed their manifesto on the cover) as well as in the actual music. Since Sleater-Kinney's dissolution, powerful all-female bands have been few and far between in indie rock and there's nothing wispy, precious, or coy about Savages on these songs. Their music is pointedly undecorated, particularly on tracks like "No Face," a searing three-and-a-half-minute showcase for what they do: singer Jehnny Beth leads the charge with her furious wail, and Ayse Hassan, Fay Milton, and Gemma Thompson do their best to keep up with her. Beth may be the band's lightning rod, but she's also a fairly versatile and evocative singer, moving from the feral, taunting "Husbands" to the ultra-gothy swoon of the closing torch song "Marshal Dear." At this point in their career, there's no escaping that Savages' music owes a significant debt to their foremothers, but Silence Yourself is more than just a collection of touchstones and footnotes. Beth and crew have a riveting presence that makes each track magnetic, and more than a few songs here hint at how wide their musical scope actually is: "Strife" swaggers along at a self-assured pace, and follows the album's poppiest chorus with doom-laden chords suggesting that Savages may be (not so) secret metalheads, while "Hit Me"'s breakneck pace nods to hardcore. Even their more traditionally post-punk tracks like "She Will" reflect a viewpoint (regarding the wilder parts of female sexuality in this case) that is unique. Given that much of the initial buzz about the band revolved around their electrifying live performances, in some ways Silence Yourself doesn't provide the full Savages experience, but it offers more than enough to make it a powerful debut that suggests they'll become an even more distinctive force to be reckoned with over time.