Savages – “Silence Yourself”

The world used to be silent. Now it has too many voices, and the noise is a constant distraction. They multiply, intensify; they will divert your attention to what’s convenient and forget to tell you about yourself. We live in an age of many stimulations. If you are focused, you are harder to reach. If you are distracted, you are available. You are distracted; you are available. You want flattery. Always looking to where it’s at, you want to take part in everything and everything to be a part of you. Your head is spinning fast at the end of your spine until you have no face at all. And yet, if the world would shut up, even for awhile, perhaps we would start hearing the distant rhythm of an angry young tune, and recompose ourselves. Perhaps, having deconstructed everything, we should be thinking about putting everything back together. Silence yourself.

So goes the manifesto of Savages, a foursome of singer Jehnny Beth, guitarist Gemma Thompson, bassist Ayse Hassan, and drummer Fay Milton that wants to return the world to a simpler time. Everything the band does zeroes in on this back-to-basics, somewhat Luddite aesthetic: the album’s cover is a simple, black-and-white photo of the group and their songs are stark, noisy and rhythmic in a way that recalls many early post-punk bands like Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, or a less funky Bush Tetras. At shows, they urge audiences to turn off their cell phones and cameras so they can FEEL THE MUSIC.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, Savages are a band that take themselves very seriously, and everything they do is calculated to provoke a response. They have positioned themselves as the elixir for all of rock music’s problems, the band that will restore music to its former glory before Twitter and Facebook and blogs like this one ruined it forever. Silence Yourself is the sound of a band that is very eager — one could say desperate — to “matter,” and it demands your attention.

A lot of this reads like criticism, and in some ways it is. Their style catches the eye and created a lot of hype, which obviously led to a backlash that isn’t entirely undeserved — it’s not difficult to picture people being annoyed by Savages and the persona they’ve built in the media for the last year. But I don’t necessarily have a problem with a band taking music seriously, and think there’s even something admirable about a group that seeks to drive a message into the brains of their listeners. It’s part of why I like Riot Grrrl and a lot of other punk music, and it’s part of why I largely enjoy Silence Yourself despite some of its flaws and the way it sometimes begs cynical guys like me to mock it.

Ranty manifestos aside, Silence Yourself is impressive because of how fully realized it is as a debut album. Whether you agree with what Savages have to say about the world or not, they’re a band that has a clear point-of-view, which they communicate effectively through music that is muscular and confident. The songs also have an urgency that is largely missing from rock music today: “Husbands,” which was released as a single last year and appears in a slightly revised form on the album, reaches the album’s highest intensity levels with its rolling bass and Beth’s increasingly frantic vocal. “She Will” begins with an immediate guitar riff, then explodes into a dissonant, primal chorus, with Beth repeatedly shrieking the title.

The band’s sound is deeply indebted to the 80s, but their lyrics about current hot topics like women’s issues and modern technology help make them more than just a backwards-looking nostalgia act. Silence Yourself does have a couple of lulls, notably when the band inevitably attempts slower “mood” pieces like “Marshal Dear” and the instrumental “Dead Nature” that I think get away from their strengths, which are being loud and strident. Fortunately, there’s enough of those moments to make Silence Yourself one of the stronger releases of the year, and one that is worth listening to for people that are a bit bored by rock’s status quo. You can buy it from their website, http://savagesband.com.

No Joy – “Wait to Pleasure”

The biggest challenge of writing about music is trying to describe why I like what I like. With some artists, it’s not too hard, because something about their music or personality lends itself to narrative, or they played a role in my life that makes for a decent story. Others are more difficult — the music might just sound the way I like music to sound, in which case there isn’t a whole lot to say other than “This is really good, in my opinion. Maybe you will like it too.” These bands may not make for the most interesting blog posts, but they are a large part of my music collection, and really define my taste more than the bigger name artists.

No Joy is one of those tricky bands. Built on the songwriting duo of Laura Lloyd and Jasamine White-Glutz, they play music that basically has everything I like: very loud shoegaze guitars that unleash sheets of noise, melodic songwriting and (of course) female vocals. Wait to Pleasure is their second full length, following 2010’s vastly underrated Ghost Blonde and last year’s Negaverse E.P, and it represents a huge leap forward for the band, who have now developed their own identity while continuing to refine their songwriting. It’s not an album that will have any sort of broader narrative attached to it, but fans of the band and this genre will almost certainly be very pleased.

No Joy separate themselves from the horde of bands mining similar influences by doing everything just a bit better: the guitars are louder, the melodies are catchier, and the production is cleaner. This is a band that understands what makes shoegaze great and why people listen to it. Songs like “Hare Tarot Lies” sum up their strengths well, combining noisy riffs and hooks, which with their indecipherable lyrics make the song accessible and mysterious at the same time. “Lunar Phobia” sounds different from any song on Ghost Blonde, with more emphasis on keyboards and a programmed drum beat that helps the band step out of the shadow of their influences a bit.

It can be easy to write off a band like No Joy as an imitator of earlier groups that have explored similar territory, but Wait for Pleasure is an album that actually doesn’t sound like much else — it has a pop sensibility that some other shoegaze groups lack, and the decibel levels separate it from lighter noise-pop bands like Best Coast. It’s basically non-stop jams, and I recommend it a lot to anyone with an interest in loud guitar rock. You can buy it from their label, Mexican Summer, here.

The xx — “Coexist”

The xx’s self-titled debut seemed to come out of nowhere in 2009. It was an album that sounded like nothing else at the time and displayed a very young band that had a shockingly developed sound, making use of minimalist electronics and space to create perfect late-night soundscapes. But all those elements that made it great also made it age poorly for me: after burning through it that year with seemingly hundreds of listens, I’ve rarely revisited it in the last couple of years. Once that out-of-nowhere element of surprise was gone, I became sick of the album’s sound and found that there was little to it beyond the surface.

Nonetheless, I was interested to hear their new album Coexist, because I still remember that feeling of first discovering their debut. I also think it’s a fascinating case study in how a young band tries to live up to massive expectations after such a successful first album — especially one like The xx, who carved out such a specific, well-defined niche that it seemed like there may not even be anything left to explore. I was curious if they would expand their sound, change their songwriting style, or pull any other tricks to separate this from their debut.

But in the back of my head, I pretty much knew what Coexist was going to be, and that’s what makes it so disappointing. It’s not that it’s horrible or something: if you liked the first album, chances are you’ll like this one. But that’s also kind of the problem. While most artists I really respect throw curveballs at their audience, Coexist is a lazy softball right down the middle. It’s the musical equivalent of a “meets expectations” grade in elementary school. It does everything that you expect it to — no more, no less — and then kind of evaporates after you listen to it, completely failing to leave any sort of impression.

At least those were my initial thoughts, but I have a habit of unhealthily analyzing my own opinions. And I thought: “what the hell did I expect?” It’s not like The xx were going to release a prog-metal psychedelic rock opera or an album of acoustic ukulele folk songs. This is just what they do. And if I liked what they did before (at least for a time), why wouldn’t I now? Am I so starved for experimentation and change that I can’t just enjoy music for what it is?

That may be the case, but I also think the songs on Coexist just aren’t as good as they were on the debut. Nothing on it is nearly as memorable as “VCR” or “Crystalised,” which had legitimate hooks to go with the band’s spare music. The exception is opening track “Angels,” a beautiful song by Romy Madley-Croft that is actually more minimal than anything on the debut but still manages to make a pretty big impact. The rest of the album just feels like The xx is trapped in the tiny musical world they created on the debut, with all the hushed male-female vocals and samey lyrics about love. (“Reunion” sounds kind of like what an xx parody band would come up with if such a horrible, misguided idea ever came into existence.) They make an effort to occasionally incorporate some dance beats, but they never quite gel with the music. Jamie Smith’s production is slick as usual, but most of the album feels underwritten in a way that the debut managed to avoid despite its bare-bones style.

The good news for The xx is that they’re still young and talented. Also, they’re already much more successful than I will ever be at anything I do in my life. And who knows, maybe Coexist appeals to their die-hard fans who want to hear more of the same stuff instead of someone like me, who always loves it when artists change up their sound and actively antagonize their core audience. Still, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone really being blown away by Coexist when it’s so similar to what they’ve already heard before.