A. Savage
9th February 2024, Doors 8pm, Main Room
Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, A. Savage expertly showcases his gifts as an observer and a lyricist. His raw emotional openness has been drawing fans.
Born in 1986 in Denton, Texas and raised around the newspaper where his parents both worked, by 2012 A. Savage became a headline of his own as the co-frontman of Parquet Courts. After more than a decade in New York, Savage has left the city and the United States, marking his exit with a masterpiece of maturity and a worthy corollary to his first solo venture, 2017’s Thawing Dawn.
“Fire is something you have to escape from, and in a way, this album is about escaping from something. This album is a burning building, and these songs are things I’d leave behind to save myself.”
The songs themselves were marked by constraint even as Savage drafted them, sculpted in part in the bucolic, nocturnal hush of rural England, where he and Jack Cooper (Modern Nature, Ultimate Painting) worked deep into the night trying not to wake Cooper’s sleeping daughter. The intimacy of these tracks is refracted by the presence of some of his closest friends, among them Cate Le Bon, who listened to Savage at work on what would become the album during a US tour in 2022.
In its recording, too, the album became as urgent and intuitive as a response to disaster. Produced by John Parish in just ten days in Bristol, the album is a devotional study in tradition—and something all Savage’s own. The end result is tantamount to a psychic odyssey, with “Le Grand Balloon” suggesting a South American lounge where the guiro respirates into a damp crowd; “Elvis in the Army” placing us in a subterranean venue where the livid, ratifying cymbal raises the room’s blood pressure; and “Mountain Time”, evoking an austere waltz playing in a desolate house, returning those listening to life. The record’s singular irreverence is stitched together by Savage’s outsize gifts as a lyricist and observer.
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