Savages // Adore Life

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. After their seminal debut album, Silence Yourself, Savages have retreated into the shadows to work on their second album. The Parisian post-punk of the former record has grown into something more considered: where they were moody and abrasive before, they’re now sincere.

Front woman Jehnny Beth (the lovechild of Ian Curtis and Siouxse Sioux) is of French origin and brings more than a bit of Parisian sophistication to a sausage-fest of post-punk.

After the resounding success of 2012’s Silence Yourself, the band took a much needed hiatus. In the interim, Beth undertook a side project with Japanese noisemakers Bo Ningen and collaborated with alt hero Julian Casablancas on last year’s ‘Boy/Girl’ – the break from her day job has done nothing to dull the edges of this androgynous icon.

The band set out to create one of the noisiest rackets heard this decade though there are no frenzied and unrestrained moments: everything is calculated with pin-point precision, the drums tightly wound, the production polished and yet none of it seems as clinical or detached as its predecessor.

Lyrically, Beth reveals her uncertainty, fear, jealousy – all human emotions at odds with the uniformed shtick we’ve seen before. Critics of Savages point out the band’s coldness – at gigs they’ve been known to go on pious tirades against society and technology, telling gig-goers to switch off their phones with not the slightest twinkle in their eye.

Fan favourite ‘Husbands’ avoided this tag with its manic whispering and apolitical lyrics and Adore Life picks up where that new wave-punk hybrid left off, weaving perfectly between slowed down songs and loud ones.

On ‘Evil’, a treatise on homophobia in the church “Soak your actions in self-doubt/ If you don’t live the way they like” she admonishes religion, barking “Stay Catholic/ Stay pragmatic/ Don’t try to change the way your parents did it/ Believe all the lies” satirically biting back at the institution. The distortion and pulverising riffs are industrial-sounding and wouldn’t be out of place in the smoky back alleys of 80s Berlin. This angular, kinetic muscle is flexed throughout the entire album.

"The distortion and industrial sound wouldn't be out of place in the smokey back alleys of 80s Berlin."

Standout track ‘T.I.W.Y.G (This Is What You Get)’ is an attack on a would-be romantic rival with squalling guitars, thundering drums and fuzzy feedback. The monochromatic sheen the four-piece exude is here given duality when it’s pared back with softer moments such as standout single ‘Adore’. The only torch song to be found, it is not sappy but profound and grounded, Beth questioning “is it human to adore life?”

WATCH ADORE LIFE - SAVAGES

At its core the album explores that age-old notion of love and romance. There’s no swooning to be found here, however: it’s the messy, ugly complications of love that Beth and her not-so-merry band of pranksters are tackling. Whether unrequited relationships, jealousy or bittersweet, they turn each notion over in their hands as though discovering the idea of love for the first time.

Few bands come armed with a full-fledged manifesto. It has laid the foundations for the group but a clarion call to the hoi polloi only gets you so far – their growing technical prowess and lyrical nous is what’s made them pioneers in a pretty apolitical Britain.

Savages don't do things by halves. Beth’s inquisitive eye and sharp tongue have just found a new target.

By Erin Doyle for Avant Garbage