When Savages first came around, I didn’t really buy it. Brooding, post-punk-indebted music should’ve easily been my thing, but there was just something that seemed so over-hyped without true substance about their whole ethos. FYF was my first chance to see them, and, well — I now believe the hype. Savages are every bit as ferocious and captivating live as anyone who’s seen them before has told you. In the middle of the set they played a bunch of new songs, and some of these in particular had dexterously bone-shattering basslines and drum patterns that seemed to operate on a perpetual level of furious tension that never totally released, but just kept tumbling and constricting. One track almost sounded like an alternate history in which U2 went significantly darker and heavier after War, down to the fact that frontwoman Jehnny Beth let out a yelping melody akin to the pissed-off early ’80s Bono. By the time the band got around to “She Will” and “Fuckers” towards the end of the set, the mood had progressed from take-no-prisoners to some kind of massive, unstoppable, mechanistic steamroller of a musical act. There is an impossible momentum to their sound, and that second album can’t come soon enough.