Don’t you hate it when your friends suggest doing something “yourself.”
You know, as in, “trust yourself,” or “watch yourself,” or, as the band Savages
puts it, Silence Yourself? It borders
on truly judgmental aggression, while maintaining a passive (but-I’m-just-trying-to-help)
quality, that pushes my buttons. “Know yourself,” there’s a killer. These are do-yourself-a-favor
phrases that are usually accompanied by that face where you smush your lips
together under your nose, fatten your cheeks, raise your eyebrows, pop out
your eyeballs, and quickly shake your head back and forth like a cat following
a feathered rod.
How is it that Savages, a London, England, all-women rock
quartet, can ask you to “silence yourself” without making a shadowy grimace,
without alienating, without ornament or pressure? According to their website:
"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."
"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."
So it makes sense. This album isn’t so much about calling
you out under the guise of friendly “advice,” it’s about calling you in. The
music asks us to lay down with it, look into its shiny eyes and drop our
shoulders. Together we drift into a dark dream-trance, where Patti Smith's drawings come to life and grab our bare arms; where Chrissie Hynde shouts grimy love into our ears; where Siouxsie undresses in front of a screen. Savages is a very special combination of female punk-rock vocals non-rhythmically spaced over post-punk-bordering-on-metal instrumentation ("Strife") and exasperated English garage-rock ("Husbands").
It’s no-nonsense, repetitive self-love and Beethoven-style pounding bass. It's incredibly slippery guitar-screeching in an echo chamber lined with black and white newsprint, "Why do you treat yourself so bad?" ("City's Full" and "Waiting for a Sign"). It absolutely requires us to be reflective in the most proprietary way—by being mindful and adapting, or getting fucked ("She Will"). What better way to bite into the music you rock your neck and your knees to than in the strong, hard arms of the one you love—yourself.
Grade: B+
It’s no-nonsense, repetitive self-love and Beethoven-style pounding bass. It's incredibly slippery guitar-screeching in an echo chamber lined with black and white newsprint, "Why do you treat yourself so bad?" ("City's Full" and "Waiting for a Sign"). It absolutely requires us to be reflective in the most proprietary way—by being mindful and adapting, or getting fucked ("She Will"). What better way to bite into the music you rock your neck and your knees to than in the strong, hard arms of the one you love—yourself.
Grade: B+
