Album Of The Week: Savages Silence Yourself

The music made by Savages, the four-piece London band who released their debut album Silence Yourself today, is a direct and linear thing. It's easy to get the sense that the band plots out its arrangements on graph paper, figuring out the intricacies of guitar/bass interplay with mathematical precision, or that its reduced every element of its music down to the skeletons, the way Spoon might do. But Savages' music has a chaos to it, too -- a messy straining to create a system of beliefs, to resonate as something more than music to soundtrack your internet browsing or whatever. As everyone on said internet seems eager to point out, their music has direct postpunk antecedents, Public Image Ltd. and especially Siouxsie And The Banshees chief among them. But when I listen to Silence Yourself, I flash back on other bands, bands that were determined to mean something in any way they could: Nation Of Ulysses, Refused, Born Against, At The Drive-In. Those bands were noisier and more given to entropy than Savages, but they were similarly drawn to jangled manifestos, to audio clips of old movies, to backwards sound experiments, to anything that could grant them a resonance that, to their minds, a simple guitar riff might not do. And with Savages, as with those other bands, the flailing doesn't distract or detract from the art. The flailing becomes the art. And it's been a long time since we've heard a band flail so exquisitely.