From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Silence Yourself is the debut studio album by the English post-punk band Savages, released on 6 May 2013 on Matador Records and Pop Noire, a label owned by vocalist Jehnny Beth. It was nominated for the 2013 Mercury Prize. 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. Savages - Adore Life. Format: CD, Year: 2013, Label: Matador (OLE-1036-2), Barcode: 22, Length: 38:45.
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.
At SXSW this year, Savages were something like Odd Future were two years ago; they were the group who came to, in a strange way, rule the festival. People went down to Austin excited to see the band, and we walked out of the band’s shows blown away, even after elevated expectations. We muttered to each other, “No, but have you seen Savages yet?” We kept them out of our mental best-shit-we’ve-seen roundups, partly because it seemed as unfair to compare them to, say, Parquet Courts as it did to compare them to Justin Timberlake. They played a million shows during the festival, but they still stood out as their own thing, apart from the tumult and the guest lists and the long lines for free Tito’s Vodka. That’s because whenever they stepped onstage, they presented themselves as a complete thing, a closed system. They all wore black; they all wore their hair short. They didn’t smile. They didn’t say hi to any crowds. They didn’t thank any sponsors, or make fun of any sponsors, or acknowledge the existence of any sponsors. They glared. They jutted their elbows. They knocked out razorwire postpunk anthems, behaving less like musicians playing rock songs and more like artists unveiling particularly severe sculptures.
The music was nothing alike, but in terms of how they carried themselves, they had a lot in common with the xx, in that they had their shit utterly and completely figured out before we ever caught a glimpse of them. Savages and the xx both had the black clothes, the restrained stage-movements, the deep rhythms, the exact haircuts that you would hope they’d have. They both somehow figured out ways to keep their bullshit-extraction process away from the audience. The two bands actually share a producer, Rodaidh McDonald, and the guy deserves credit for making these two great bands spartanize their respective sounds, to radically different effects. And as with the xx, there was absolutely no doubt that Savages would pull it off when they got around to releasing an album.
Silence Yourself is a special album. It comes coated with its own manifesto, something about shielding your brain from digital noise and immersing yourself in something greater. But that manifesto would mean nothing attached to a lesser album; Silence Yourself does a much better job at making the argument than the band’s words could ever do. It’s an album that demands attention and determination. When it’s on, I clench my teeth a little tighter, tense my muscles a little tenser. Colors seem more vivid and sharply defined. Any task I’m working on — the blog post I’m writing, the dish I’m scrubbing, the diaper I’m changing — takes on a breathless new urgency.
“Husbands,” the band’s breakout song, is about waking up and realizing that you don’t know the person next to you, making that sound like the deeply apocalyptic prospect it should be. The Talking Heads sang about something similar on “Once In A Lifetime,” but that song had wonder and beauty in it; this one gets its point across in a terse, flinty surf riff like the one on the Dead Kennedys’ “Police Truck.” “Shut Up” launches headlong from an introductory Cassavetes dialog sample into a spidery wailer that never lets up. “City’s Full” is just as fast but thicker and beefier, and it makes plenty of use of the faint but icy accent that raised-in-France frontwoman Jehnny Beth blessedly never lost after she moved to the UK. “Hit Me” is a squealing, feedback-addled post-hardcore sprint, but even its peals of noise feel precisely manicured. The hard and triumphant “No Face” may be the strongest of the album’s bangers, and its hook (“You have no face! You have no face! You have! No face!”) has been rattling around in my skull since the first time I heard the album.
But the song’s greatest moments might be the two where the band slows down and gives its attack some room to breathe. “Waiting For A Sign” almost qualifies as doom-metal, but the song’s thunderous whomp comes undiminshed by effects-pedal pillowing, and there’s nothing nostalgic or comforting or bongwater-scented about its deliberate pound. “Marshall Dear,” meanwhile, has eerily placid pianos and a honking jazz saxophone that somehow never push it toward X-Ray Spex territory; the extra instrumentation give the song a measured calm that would’ve played great on early-’90s alt-rock radio. Those two songs, in particular, are the ones that convince me that Savages won’t be a one-album wonder, that their sound has more shadows to it than the wonderfully stressed knife-rock that the rest of the album offers. They’re the rare signs that the band is still learning new ways to channel its power. But that power, already entirely intact, is what makes Silence Yourself so special. Savages come to us as a fully-formed wrecking crew, and they’ve already made a debut album fierce and intense enough to shame bands that have been around for much, much longer.
Silence Yourself is out today on Pop Noire/Matador.
Savages Silence Yourself Torrent
Other albums of note out this week:
• Deerhunter’s messily garage-rocky Monomania.
• Mikal Cronin’s generously sunny classic-rocker MCII.
• She & Him’s reliably bright and twee Volume 3.
• Van Dyke Parks’s lush, long-awaited Songs Cycled.
• Hokey Fright, the winsome but dark debut from the Uncluded, the unlikely team of Aesop Rock and Kimya Dawson.
• Talib Kweli’s hilariously titled Prisoner Of Conscious.
• Still Corners’ introverted, synthy Strange Pleasures.
• The Child Of Lov’s soulful but mysteriously glitchy self-titled debut.
• Co La’s wriggling electronic Moody Coup.
• Way Yes’s smooth midwestern indie-popper Tog Pebbles.
• The slick, star-rock Great Gatsby soundtrack.
more from Album Of The Week
Ayes Hassan, Gemma Thompson, Jehnny Beth and Fay Milton. Photo byRichard Dumas
Silence Yourself is the debut album by Savages, a ferocious, fully formed record that sounds like a lost transmission from the core of England’s post-punk lineage.
The world’s first sighting of Savages came as recently as Jan. 2012, with a short, well-shot B&W video of the band performing one of their best songs (my personal favourite), “City’s Full.” With Ayse Hassan’s bass at the apex of the mix and singer Jehnny Beth’s wide-eyed transfixion, it screams Joy Division more loudly than anything on their subsequent record does.
The comparison to the posthumously ubiquitous Manchester band is common, as is that of Beth’s voice to Siouxsie Sioux and Gemma Thompson’s guitar grind to PiL. They’re all apt, but more than most contemporary bands designated post-punk, Savages are worthy of inclusion in that canon. And unlike much of the canon itself (with the possible exception of Siouxsie & the Banshees, who had their moments), Savages are sexy—their music, while easily linked to post-punk’s anti-blues, “rip it up and start again” ethos, doesn’t entirely eschew rock ’n’ roll’s carnal groove. Just listen to “Strife”—the song would penetrate you sexually if it only had a cock.
And that, if you’ll pardon the salacious segue, is where Johnny Hostile comes in. Beth and Hostile—née Camille Berthomier and Nicolas Congé—have personal and musical roots that go deeper than this decade, down to 2006, when they left their hometown of Poitiers, France for London, where they launched their music project John & Jehn.
“It was a very intimate project, something that was much more a way of life than a profession, which is what I consider the music to be now with Savages,” says Beth. “John & Jehn was, for me, very valuable—everything I know about music or the music business is something I’ve learned with John.”
When it came time for the duo to tour their sophomore LP, Hostile enlisted a drummer and a girl he had “a guitar crush on”: Gemma Thompson. Over two years on the road, he and Thompson made a musical connection that moved her to ask him to sing in a new band she was forming with Hassan, the band that would become Savages. But this coincided with John & Jehn falling out with their label, founding the Pop Noire label and signing LESCOP, a project that Hostile became increasingly occupied with in the studio. So he stepped away from Savages, never venturing to centre stage, though he’d eventually return to produce Silence Yourself.
“I thought it’d be a good idea if I tried to sing for this project,” says Beth. “When Gemma came up with the name Savages, I was writing lyrics that I thought were similar to the ideas that Gemma had and the things she was reading at the time, and so we sat down and tried to see it clearly. But there were no sounds—it was more like ideas. And then the three of us—me, Gemma and Ayse—thought we should have a female drummer, so we asked around and found Fay.”
When asked why the drummer needed to be female, Beth laughed at her inability to explain their reasoning. An intuitive desire “to create something complete” was as close as she came to an answer. It’s not much of a leap to attribute the choice to aesthetic consistency, especially when you see what a different beast Beth was in John & Jehn, with her longer hair, vulnerable eyes and relatively innocent lyrics about love. Savages is deceptively high-concept, and that’s what makes them so damn tight.
Aside from the band’s sonic power and songwriting skill, and Beth’s gripping stage presence and masterful voice, Savages are remarkable for the way that her penmanship matches the music’s sexual energy. She manages to be frank AND sexy without sacrificing poetic flow, an especially impressive feat for an ESL writer.
“I was researching erotic poetry a lot, because the third John & Jehn record has a lot of exploration into eroticism. It was really hard to find a female voice for eroticism, something that was going to be direct, simple and not too romantic. And funnily enough, I found that very much in gay poetry. Then I found some similarities between erotic poetry and war poetry. I found the same directness, and it had the same impact on me. Often very powerful—poems which would contain the extremes of life and the intensity that I needed.
“Then, in terms of music, it was more trying to find a representation of the ideas that we were having, and also concentrating on the fact that we wanted to write for stage. We wanted to write music to be performed.”
As great as their record is, seeing Savages’ live show is reportedly essential—the NME called it “frottage-inducing,” but we’ll have to report back to you about that. In John & Jehn, Beth developed a flare for theatricality, and an understanding that focused intent and simple presentation are key to audiences’ hearts and minds.
Savages Silence Yourself Rare
“It’s not that people really notice it. It’s kind of subliminal,” she says of Savages’ performance technique. “Instead of looking at what other bands are doing, we just asked ourselves, ‘What would you do if you had to do everything from the beginning, strip everything down and start again from scratch?’ This is how we try to communicate with our music in different ways, to bring people into our world.” ■
Savages play with opener Johnny Hostile at la Tulipe (4530 Papineau) on Monday, July 15, 8 p.m., $20/$23, all ages.