Eurythmics

Savage

The definitive Eurythmics album

Review Score:

(10/10)
Savage is the definitive Eurythmics album and one of the high points of the 80's for this reviewer. Coming on the heels of two rather conventional rock-and-soul albums, Savage marked a return to the duo's experimental synth origins, taking the musical form that they commanded so effortlessly to new heights of creativity. Yet the bleak (some would say oblique) and dark subject matter had the effect of alienating mainstream listeners, even though the songs were the best they ever crafted. The album veers between bitter introspection over a failed relationship and angry ranting that is sometimes generalized to all men (such as on the ironically titled I Need A Man). A couple of tracks border on hysteria, like Beethoven and Do You Want to Break Up, which sound like nervous breakdowns in progress. The inaccessibility of the style and subject matter meant that only the truest of Eurythmics fans would remain devoted to this album.

Ask fans why they like this album and you'll get a bunch of responses: It's deep, hypnotic electronic grooves (as on the gorgeous, minimalist Heaven); the stunning "wall of sound" feel of the songs (notably Shame, their finest single ever); the angry, searing lyrics; and especially the subtly subversive and utterly compelling music videos, like I Need A Man, in which Annie Lennox, grotesquely tarted up, seems to parody a transvestite, self-consciously lip synching to her own song like in a drag show. (Think about it: she's playing a man playing a woman!)

Incidentally, the most compelling photographs of the icily beautiful Lennox come from this era - her tranny phase. A number of photos from the Savage sessions were published in Alistair Thain's collected works - a coffee table photography book with Lennox on the cover that is sadly out of print (I could kick myself for not shelling out the $70 for it when I saw it in L.A. years ago). The book includes interesting commentary about the photo sessions. Thain reveals that he himself is the photographer lurking in the shadows of Sophie Muller's melancholy video for Savage, while Muller's cam was intended to be a voyeuristic participant of the session.

For this reviewer, though, it will always be one thing that draws me again and again to this album: That Voice. Lennox's glorious alto in the 90's is sounding more worn (yet somehow richer), but back in 1987 it was in peak form, capable of dizzying highs and elegant vocal pirouettes, R&B belting and straight folk singing. Like Eurythmics' music, her voice defies categorization and typecasting. A profound paradox of Savage is that Lennox delivers one of her most soulful performances in one of the finest synth-rock albums ever made (listen, for instance, to You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart and tell me that is not the sound of a soul singer). Her voice is compelling even when she is not singing (like during the bridge of the gorgeous half-sung, half-spoken Heaven, in which every line is incomplete as if the singer was trailing off into a oblivion of ecstasy only she can feel). But enough rhapsodizing. Get this album for yourself.

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