"You know, we played our first gig in Brighton. It's nice to be back," Savages frontwoman Jehnny Beth informs her audience towards the close of this evening's show. "This song is called 'F******…"
Don't worry, there was a mental paragraph break there. If Savages deal in bristling hostility, it's of a purely stylistic kind. Their self-consciously stern and dark debut Silence Yourself, indebted to the black-clad side of the 80s, is gleeful in its evil, and at its strongest live, drummer Faye Milton flailing away like a Kraken in the background as the tiny, evil Jehnny Beth stares and barks and purrs balefully and guitarist Gemma Thompson and bassist Ayse Hasan weld their sheets of beautiful noise.
"Something New" and the staccato yelp of "Husbands" are jammed out, sometimes too long, but give a glimpse of where Savages could go in the future, a roiling, many-hued din more complex than goth posturing. A surprisingly sweet cover of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" shows that even covering the darkest of icons, they're capable of lightness of touch, and "F******" closes proceedings in a dance-punk carnival jam - Beth dancing away all froideur - that suggests there's much more than monochrome to come from these four.
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