Review: Savages show their serious and fun sides at the El Rey

What does it mean to insult an all-female rock band as “too serious?”

That’s one undercurrent that bothered me at Savages’ incendiary set at the El Rey Theatre on Thursday night. The public face of the London quartet is this: four young women who play a live-wire kind of experimental punk. They wear a lot of black and have stares that could re-freeze a melting Arctic; the music plumbs new depths of minor keys, and they prefer guitar playing that sounds more like sticking a guitar cable in an electrical socket. They start their debut album, “Silence Yourself,” with a stern Cassavettes quote from “Opening Night,” and their lyrics walk right up to the edge of where sex meets violence and consent meets violation.

That’s all true as far as it goes, but as I watched them detonate their instruments for an hour on Wednesday (the second night of a sold-out two-night stand), I had to ask, “Does no one notice that this band is a lot of fun too?”

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Underneath guitarist Gemma Thompson’s tumult, Ayse Hassan used the catwalking funk basslines of beloved New York City groups such as the Bush Tetras and ESG; singer Jehnny Beth is totally self-aware about her punk-theory provocations (I laughed along with her when she closed the set saying, “Now that we have deconstructed everything, it’s time to put it all back together), and she revels in horror-flick lyrical shrieks such as “I woke up and I saw the face of a guy, I don’t know who he was, he had no eyes.”

Critics almost uniformly praised Savages’ debut at its release. But there’s also a weird undercurrent among some male music fans where they need to hate or dismiss this band (see a prime example here). The idea that a group of women can be so empirically good at making volatile and imaginative rock music, but tell stories so antagonistic to male perspectives -- and really mean it -- is threatening.

So naturally, they must be dour harridans or secretly svengalied by a male producer or “not that bright” or God forbid, too serious.

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They’re not, but some guys need them to be, otherwise they might have to actually take them seriously.

That’s not to say Savages are a perfect act. The creepy, exhilarating “Husbands” has justifiably become the band’s calling card -- it’s the most melodic, immediate song in the group’s short catalog, which could offer more of such traits. On Wednesday, they had a few moments of instrument-tuning where the stage lulled with dead air, breaking the furious spell just beforehand.

But there’s a reason they got a New Yorker essay and Pitchfork multimedia blowout feature before they’d barely even played a U.S. tour. They’re doing three of the hardest jobs in rock music. They’re genuinely re-imagining old influences (Public Image Ltd., the Gun Club, the Factory Records stable), introducing new ideas (a highlight Wednesday was “Hit Me,” an empathetic sex-in-extremis tribute to the porn star Belladonna) and becoming captivating performers and public figures. Beth in particular has an excellent move where she’ll sneer an invitation to commit violence on her, over and over again, until it eventually feels as if the tables have turned, and the band blows into “Hit Me” or “Shut Up,” and it’s clear that Savages won the fight.

I can’t think of many groups since Hole -- which faced almost all the same criticism, note for note -- that are so good at meeting all the traditionally “male” criteria for being a great band while totally upending how gender plays out in violent music.

Their pleasures aren’t academic, though. Lest one overthink this all, they wrapped up their Wednesday set with what Beth referred to with an unprintable title. But it came with a venting, howling chorus reassuring fans, “don’t let the ... get you down.” It’s funnier and sweeter with the profanity, but it stood as proof that Savages are serious about correcting the record of men and women in the world, and about being a damn good rock band -- by anyone’s standards -- in the process.

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