Savages’ Adore Life focuses on most complex emotion

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      As Savages has been surprisingly up-front about admitting, Adore Life—the U.K. band’s second full-length—is a record that revolves around love. If that theme is somewhat unexpected, it’s only because the band’s Mercury Prize–nominated debut, Silence Yourself, wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of romantic mood music. When the group seemingly arrived out of nowhere in London in 2013, its songs matched postpunk abrasiveness with lyrics that suggested someone had been reading from the bible of I Hate All Authority.

      But bassist Ayse Hassan suggests there’s more than one way to come at one of the most complex of all human emotions.

      “The record’s about all shades of love and the human condition, really,” says the outgoing Londoner. “With love, there’s so much you can take from it, and also there’s so many angles you can see things from. For us, there are some personal experiences. Or I should say many personal experiences. But there’s also something more there.”

      Expanding on that, she reveals that Savages found itself in the middle of a media-hype hurricane after the release of Silence Yourself. At first, the band members—Hassan, plus singer Jehnny Beth, guitarist Gemma Thompson, and drummer Fay Milton—closed ranks, becoming a fiercely insular unit that relied on each other for strength. Then they realized there was something positive to be gained by opening up to their fellow human beings.

      “I feel like when we first started the band, we were trying to protect ourselves from splitting up,” Hassan admits. “We had a lot of outside pressure around us that could have broken us up early on. But we started to get more comfortable as a group, and as a result we learned to give more to the audience. As we met a lot of our fans, we started to really be more open. I think that exploring the subject of love, in the context of the band that we are, was something that we saw as a bit of a risk. It’s not a subject that we thought we’d ever cover, and here we’ve covered it on our second record, which is quite exciting.”

      Adore Life is not only exciting, but also one of the best records of the year. The album starts out with the grimy retro grunge of “The Answer”, which careens to a halt with Beth howling “If you don’t love me, you don’t love anybody/Ain’t you glad it’s you?” What follows is pure catharsis, as Savages takes things to a molasses crawl on “Slowing Down the World”, gets aggro to the max on the raging “T.I.W.Y.G.”, and retools postpunk for a new generation on the thumping “Evil”.

      The album’s most powerful moment comes at the three-minute mark of “Adore”, when, over nothing but flesh-scrape guitar and doomsday bass, Beth turns the words “I adore life” into a desperate mantra.

      The best part? That sentiment couldn’t be more true, not just for her, but for her bandmates as well.

      “Everything we’ve done till now is all about enjoying the experience of life and having fun,” Hassan says brightly. “We’re all about immersing ourselves in the moment, and that really comes across in how we are as people.”

      Savages plays the Imperial next Friday (May 27).

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