• Le Guess Who? 2016 @ Utrecht, NL

    November 28, 2016 - By 

    It’s been a weird year for the ‘Boutique’ festival market, with ATP coming to an official end following a string of debacles, but in its tenth year, Utrecht’s Le Guess Who? somehow does it. Across four days, it ties together seldom-seen legends, a pocket of essential esoterica, and today’s most boundary-pushing acts, the lineup this year curated by Wilco, Suuns, Julia Holter & Savages. Utrecht is the sophisticated, civilised, more communal sister city of Amsterdam, located just half an hour south of the capital, and in a city with the Rietveld Schröderhuis built in 1924 it houses the kind of forward-thinking…

  • Savages – Adore Life

    January 22, 2016 - By 

    Revivalism – is that a dirty word? It is if you’re in a band, trying to forge your own sound while folk are sitting there spouting comparisons. As Ought have shown us Stateside, if you’re going to retread well-worn ground, you better lace up your assault boots and do so with conviction, stamping any glib reference points from the mind of the listener. Savages aren’t short on conviction. Nor are they short of muscle in the art of ratcheting up the tension within a track. Post punk was all about tension, though, wasn’t it? The London quartet’s debut, Silence Yourself,…

  • Stream: Goldie Fawn – Savages

    January 21, 2016 - By 

    Having launched the project back in early 2014, Belfast’s Katie Richardson AKA Goldie Fawn has never been one to conceal her outlook on the inner workings of what it means or feels to be an artist. Mirroring the largely contemplative nature of her electro-inflected pop craft, the accompanying proviso to her long-awaited debut single as Goldie Fawn, ‘Savages’, taps into the uncertainty and spectre of self-doubt that all often too creeps in uninvited. “On of the biggest frustrations of being a musician/artist can bee sitting on work for months or even years until ‘the right time,’” Richardson says. “Sometimes this magical…

  • Watch: Savages – I Am Here

    September 3, 2013 - By 

    Having delivered an expectedly blistering performance at the tenth Electric Picnic at the weekend, London all-female post-punk quartet Savages have unveiled their video for ‘I Am Here’. Directed by Joshua Zucker-Pluda, the video employs a technique initiated by composer Alcin Lucier: recording the band’s performance, playing the performance back and recording it again, over and over and over again. “There’s a real emotional intensity to Savages’ live presence,” said Zucker-Pluda about the video. “I was interested in the idea that the band’s performance could be so powerful that it would leave a kind of psychic scar or echo within the…

  • The Round-Up: 10/05/13

    May 10, 2013 - By 

    The very first of what will be our weekly retrospective on what’s been happening in the music world – both local and much further afield – this week’s Round-Up is a decidedly English affair… Bow Down As has often been his way for five decades now, David Bowie got into a spot of bother on Wednesday for the religious imagery in his video for his latest single, ‘The Next Day’. Featuring the sixty-six year-old as a Christ-like figure, the video was taken down from YouTube for supposedly breaching its Terms of Use. It has since been returned with an adult-only…

  • Savages – Silence Yourself

    May 9, 2013 - By 

    Someone once said, “hype is a dangerous thing” (which it can be, depending upon who or what is being hyped and, perhaps more importantly, who or what is creating the hype). Just under a year since the release of their debut single ‘Flying To Berlin’, London all-female quartet Savages have been moth-to-bright-light attractive to a very contemporary type of hype – all thanks, that is, to the b-side from the debut single in question. A chromatically descending, shrieking slab of claustrophobic antipathy, ‘Husbands’ felt like a fully-formed masterstroke; a lost post-punk gem propelled by an energy and urgency that came…