A. Savage – ‘Several Songs About Fire’ album review: Indie rock at its most smoky and subdued
A. Savage says he imagines himself playing his second solo album in a small club that is “slowly burning”. On the intimacy his newest offering creates, he’s entirely correct. The largely acoustic venture is warm and inviting but often lacks the urgency its title evokes. “Fire is something you have to escape from, and in a way, this album is about escaping from something,” explains Savage. “This album is a burning building, and these songs are things I’d leave behind to save myself.” What we’re left with instead are smoky embers, suggestions of great indie rock numbers, that are suffocated by their own restraint.
Written in England alongside Modern Nature’s Jack Cooper, the track’s hushed qualities are largely owed to the fact they didn’t want to wake Cooper’s sleeping daughter as they worked through the night. The primary goal was to refine each of the album’s ten songs until they could be played just on acoustic guitar. The homespun quality it’s left with hums steadily off its most sedate numbers, like on opener ‘Hurtin’ Or Healed’ and ‘Mountain Time’.
It’s also echoed in the host of Savage’s close friends that appear on the album: Cate Le Bon, her bandmate Euan Hinselwood, Dylan Hadley, and Magdalena McLean. For all these collaborative forces, it still feels distinctly insular, which can be taken as a drawback or a triumph, depending on what kind of listener you are. Fans of sparse instrumentation and a cosy, folk-tinged sound will adore this album.
Even for those looking for something more energetically charged, Savage provides flashes of heart, particularly on ‘Le Grande Balloon’ and in the loungey sax on ‘Thanksgiving Prayer‘. ‘Elvis In The Army’ also reels you in with its bouncy opening but retreats too quickly back to a familiar guitar line that forces the Savage’s voice to do the heavy lifting.
While the songs might amble by too idly for some, it’s worth absorbing Savage’s writing. He perfectly balances the existential and the mundane, interrogating religion in the same breath as walking us through his weekly routine: “My weekly dinner / Of popcorn and Coke / Every Friday, like communion / That I took as a joke.”
He is effortlessly poetic: “My money melts like sugar in the shower when I don’t sing,” as well as sharply perceptive, seemingly on everything from the death of rock and roll to materialism: “My new green coat / That my dear friend gave to me / Is the most-recent best thing I have.” Lyrics take the form of questions as often as they do vivid descriptions of a scene, which imbues the album with suitably uncertain energy.
Sweeping mountain landscapes are given the same fleshed-out descriptions as laundromats are, in another constant battle of juxtapositions. What’s frustrating is that the imagery is beautiful but buoyed by the music, which always crackles with near brilliance. “Silence is golden / But nothing quite roars,” he sings on ‘Hurtin’ or Healed’, in what feels like a fitting assessment of the record. For all its radiant lyricism, the fire it promises never fully catches.
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