Savages’ second record is an exhilarating leap
forward from their (already quite excellent) debut. Channelling Sleater-Kinney through an angry-funnel, Savages make harsh, intelligent post-punk. Like Sleater-Kinney,
they have been cited as feminist champions, but, unlike Sleater-Kinney, that has more to do with the largely irrelevant
fact that they are an all-female band than it does with any sort of explicit
feminist manifesto. Adore Life is definitely not an album about ‘the female
perspective’, but it is an album that is about love from a female perspective. Not
a stereotypically gooey female version of love, though. This is an album of raw emotion and, at
times, deep pain. It’s a howling
appraisal of bad relationships in an Is
This Desire? era PJ Harvey
vein. Technically proficient but for the
most part musically quite restrained, Adore Life has emotional depth and some fantastically
immediate songs. The simple, pounding
bass – underpinning many of the tracks on show here – is just a joy.
sample track: Evil