Savages: Silence Yourself

"This is a post-punk band, not in the general sense but in the anachronistically literal one, as if the first wave of punk had just happened and needed an answer. It’s also a band made up of four women, and its foundation is the tense and severe music from Britain and New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s, particularly in groups involving women: the Bush Tetras and the Slits, for example, who made music for dancing and critical thinking, as if it were understood that punk had blasted down pop, and their jobs were to build it up again from scratch, rather than sliding into received wisdom about normative professionalism. Savages made an intermittently exciting first record, 'Silence Yourself' (Matador), and the benefit of hearing it at home in a controlled environment is the context the group has given it: the thudding and ringing and ropy sound of the recording; the lyrics — published in capital letters on the band’s Web site, about primal energies and living in the present and gender roles scrutinized from a distance — and the manifestoes, streaked with uppercase letters ..." (Ben Ratliff, "Gender Roles, Manifestoes and Sounds of a Certain Era," New York Times, 7/12/13).

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