127. Savages

Roundhouse

17 March 2016

Savages’ second album, Adore Life, landed a few months back like a precision strike, an unflinching, monochrome meditation on love as a destructive, destabilising force. No romance, no soft-focus glow, just the cold truth of what happens if emotion becomes self-destructive compulsion.

The critical consensus was clear: live, they were unmissable. Not just good, essential. So here we were at the Roundhouse, drinks in the Members Bar, early for once because the support wasn’t a warm-up act to be ignored, but Bo Ningen, Japan’s high-voltage noise-rock export with a reputation for weaponizing chaos.

They don’t so much take the stage as detonate on it. Bo Ningen’s set is a controlled explosion of distortion, feedback and velocity: feral, precise, and utterly committed. The effect is immediate: the room’s attention shifts from polite curiosity to full engagement. This is not background noise.

Then Savages step out, and everything tightens. Jenny Beth arrives first in presence if not in body: black army jacket, hair pulled back, gaze like a sniper scope. She doesn’t address the crowd; she assesses it. The bass drops in like a wrecking ball and the lead guitar cuts rage arcs through the air, all jack-hammered into the floor by the drummer’s feral pounding, threatening to smash a stick or two.

Beth is a rare kind of frontwoman, she uses stillness as a threat, movement with intent. She walks the edge of the stage like she’s patrolling a perimeter, then suddenly she’s in the crowd, walking on the heads and shoulders of the willing before diving back, a conductor of both music and atmosphere.

A would-be front-row stage diver summersaults over the barrier; Beth glances at security, coolly authorising him with, “Yeah, that’s allowed,” a line that lands somewhere between permission and provocation and the bouncer takes the hint, allowing the interloper to flee the scene.

The aesthetic is stripped to essentials; no colour, no flourish, no wasted motion. White strobes cut the blackness into harsh, surgical slices. “Adore” arrives like a slow-release detonation, fists raised across the room in something between solidarity and surrender. The set ends with “Fuckers”, and Bo Ningen back on stage, not just a song but a command, strafed into the crowd until the final chord rings out and the chokehold on us is released.

When it’s over, there’s no question why Savages command the kind of praise they do. This isn’t hype. It’s a band operating at full precision and full force, a rare combination. Few others even get close.