SAVAK
Flavors of Paradise
PECULIAR WORKS/ERNEST JENNING RECORD CO
If your Metal Box is rusted, or you’re missing the late, great kings of angularity UK division (Mark E. Smith, Keith Levene, Andy Gill), Brooklyn’s jagged-alt supergroup SAVAK has your number. It may not be the number they want you to have, as they’ve always been tagged as a power-pop outfit, but angled rhythms with nerve-jangled guitars is what SAVAK does best, in my humble opinion. Featuring members of Obits, The Cops, and Holy Fuck, SAVAK have made five albums of Fall-Gang-of-Public-Image sound without aping their heroes since forming in 2015. Now, with the spaciousness and dedication to melody (first, before angled rhythm) that is Flavors of Paradise, all of the outfit’s goals of staying loose and loudly creepy while maintaining their pop sheen have been accomplished—and then some.
Co-frontmen Sohrab Habibion and Michael Jaworski aren’t the most liquidly tuneful of vocalists on a mano a mano basis—say, on the ringing sting of lean, mean absurdity that is “Two Lamps,” or the sleekly produced “Living Will.” Yet when they do their levelheaded best to harmonize, the unified results are oddly boyish and handsomely off-the-mark in the very best way. Together with their open, airy production, moments such as the engagingly repetitive “What Is It Worth,” the Who-vamping “Will Get Fooled Again,” and the spiky likes of “It Happens to You” and “Jump Into the Night” are akin to listening to a K-tel label greatest hits collection of the UK pop ’60s without being able to name the band.
When SAVAK finish off their new album with the slow-paced closer and its lyric “All we want is attribution,” you’d be hard pressed to assign categorization. And that’s for the best.
