Why can’t things in life just come easy?
If that’s too big of a philosophical question for you, don’t despair (or, worse, tune out): with a fist held high in the air, defiantly adoring life and, above all, love, the U.K.-based band Savages aims to musically tackle such big questions when it plays Minneapolis’s Fine Line Music Cafe on May 21 at 9 p.m.
Of course, the now-famous rock band – a combination of metaphysical nitty-gritty post-deconstructionist disco moshpitting fun and seriousness – will all be on hand. Jehnny Beth, Gemma Thompson, Ayse Hassan, Fay Milton will also be joined by special musical guests Head Wound City.
If you can imagine an all-female musical version of "Lord of the Flies," you’d be close – at least traveling one avenue – to arriving at Savages. They scored a big hit with their 2013 debut album, "Silence Yourself," then went on to do anything but that. "Adore Life" came roughly three years later. Now the heady-but-punk artists are getting their act together and taking it on the road, and they’ve gone on record saying how important love is to them (that emotion, in all its attendant stripes, could almost be said to be their main theme). They even see the moshpit as a form of mass love.
Even if their musical style, which keeps coalescing into something different, even deeper, as they run wild all over the globe, isn’t exactly your thing, it’s hard not to be intrigued by a group of tune-makers who speculate about such things as, "It’s about digging through your dirt to look for diamonds. It’s about claiming your right to think unacceptable thoughts. It’s about boredom and the things we do to drive it away. It’s about being on your own so you can be with people. It’s about knowing what it means to be human and what it might mean one day. It’s about the parts and the sum of the parts. It’s about the music and the message: together, one and the same. It’s about bass, guitars, drums, and vocals. It’s about opening-out and never, ever dying. But most of all it’s about love, every kind of love."
ADVERTISEMENT
They didn’t put question marks in that press release verbiage, although they certainly could have. They did, however, provide a solution: "Love is the answer."
After all, "The greatest ideas are the simplest," as William Golding once wrote.
