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Three weeks after gunmen stormed the Bataclan in Paris last November and slaughtered 89 people at a rock concert, a band called Savages stood onstage 2 miles away and sang songs about love. Not the hippie-dippie, "shine on your brother" kind of love, or even really the romantic kind, but a raw, instinctual kind of love—the kind that gives life, inoculates against evil, and sounds best played loud and vicious.
It was just the catharsis the audience needed.
"It was really intense, that show," says Savages drummer Fay Milton over the phone, on a break from record-shopping at home in London. "There were a lot of people crying. I think we were crying as well."
At the time, Savages was a month away from releasing its second album, Adore Life, and in a way, the Paris show affirmed the new direction the band was headed. When it debuted three years earlier, with the widely acclaimed Silence Yourself, it was as post-punk ice queens, raging against sexual violence and patriarchal oppression through hailstorms of cold, concentrated noise. With Adore Life, the instrumental attack hasn't softened a bit, but the tone has shifted—from a band lashing out to one reaching inward, ripping open its chest and proclaiming, in no uncertain terms, that "love is the answer."
It's a change directly inspired by the band's relationship with its fans, and its desire to forge a greater communion with them. In the beginning, Savage's chilly sound and steely stage presence didn't exactly foster a sense of togetherness. Sheathed all in black, singer Jehnny Beth would assume a fighter's stance, throwing jabs at the air and staring down the front row like Holly Holm preparing to kick an opponent's head off. (The band would also post notices asking fans to refrain from using phones during concerts, a request they typically complied with, probably out of sheer intimidation.) Savages earned a reputation as one the world's fiercest live acts, but the intensity proved distancing.
"When we started with Silence Yourself, we would go onstage and be very confrontational," Milton says. "For our first year or so, people would come and watch us but they would be looking at us like animals in a zoo almost, trying to work out what was going on."
As the band continued to tour, both the quartet and their fans came to see Savages shows as a form of collective release—what Milton describes as "a massive kind of party." What that led to was not necessarily a kinder, gentler Savages, especially as the music itself is concerned: On Adore Life, Ayse Hassan's bass remains at once sludgy and liquid, like magma sliding down the face of a volcano, and guitarist Gemma Thompson still emits sparks and cast shadows in equal measure. But it did cause Beth to open up more, in performance—she now often ventures into the crowd rather than just menacing them—and on record. Adore Life explores love in all its convolutions, and comes to the conclusion that it's worth it.
"Is it human to adore life?" Beth asks on "Adore," the closest thing to a ballad the band's written yet. "Maybe I will die maybe tomorrow/So I need to say I adore life."
It's a bold stance for a band working in a genre whose antecedents compared love to a case of anthrax poisoning and declared "anger is an energy." But while Savages might wear its influences unashamedly, the band members have come to reject the post-punk ideal of empowerment through negation. In fact, it almost offends them.
"It's always positivity," Milton says, nearly bristling at the suggestion that there's anything else to believe in. "For sure."
SEE IT: Savages plays Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., with Head Wound City, on Saturday, May 28. 9 pm. $18.50 advance, $20 day of show. All ages.
Willamette Week