Silence Yourself

I made a slight mistake when I first listened to this album. I listened to it from my bed, from my laptop speakers, instead of plugging it into the speakers on my desk and getting rid of that annoying tinny-ness. Even though it's oddly charming like this, as though it harks back to days of listening to CDs on little CD players with no option to fidget with the bass until it sounds 'right' and it turns out a little odd, it's much better when amped up a little by even my not-perfect sound system.

I first heard Savages at Radio One's Hackney Weekend last year, stopping by the BBC Introducing Stage in between acts on the bigger stages. My brother, who I went with, looked a teensy bit unimpressed, and I got the feeling that he wanted to head back to the dance tent, but I was entranced. These girls looked so cool, so much so that the word didn't do them justice. There I was, in my shorts and wellies and flowery headband, and there they were, holding the small audience that gathered in front of them in some kind of trance. There was nothing polished about them, no sheen of commercialising themselves or being anything other than they were; they just played.

Savages, an all-girl four-piece that's a hundred miles from Spice Girls style 'girl bands' and much closer to Souxsie-Soux and the Banshees, without the theatrics, hark back to postpunk in the best way. Even the album sleeve reminded me of the CDs in the drawer at home that my parents bought 'back in the day'. It's raw, slightly haunting, it's somehow resonating through my brain and making me type excitedly without my glasses on. Every distortion, every repeated lyric, every riff and change of riff mid song, it's all put together in a way that screams 'organised chaos' like no teenage bedroom ever could. No sign of any tangible emotion, no love song or ode to best friends.

It's a viseral feeling, when a band echoes in your core, not because you're a live show and it's so loud that it takes over your senses, but because they're so together, and it's powerful in a way that music always should be and often isn't. I can't imagine this being a soundtrack to a walk, although I don't doubt that it will be. It demands full attention. It feels like nothing I've heard in a long time.
I don't really know how to talk about music like this, music that sounds old and new. Savages themselves, in a move that rings a little pretentious, on their website, declare what they want us to take away from them:

"SAVAGES is not trying to give you something you didn’t have already, it is calling within yourself something you buried ages ago, it is an attempt to reveal and reconnect your PHYSICAL and EMOTIONAL self and give you the urge to experience your life differently, your girlfriends, your husbands, your jobs, your erotic life and the place music occupies in your life. Because we must teach ourselves new ways of POSITIVE MANIPULATIONS, music and words are aiming to strike like lightning, like a punch in the face, a determination to understand the WILL and DESIRES of the self."

It sounds painfully earnest taken out of context, but I found this quote after I'd listened to the album (this is directly copy-and-pasted from their website, capitals and all), and I can't help but feel as though the album achieved at least some of this in me.

By the time you reach 'Marshal Dear', the final track, in which Jehnny Beth orders you to follow the advice of the album title, you feel a little like you just came off a roller-coaster, shaky with the tension you didn't notice and very aware of how everything was moving around you.