by Dan Goldin (@paintingwithdan)
SAVAK was a band of indie rock veterans before they began playing together (having played in Obits, Edsel, and Enon, among others). These days SAVAK are veterans in their own right, beyond their back catalogs, with the Brooklyn based trio getting ready to release their seventh full length album, SQUAWK!, out May 30th via Peculiar Works Music and Ernest Jenning Record Co.. Their status is evident the moment you hear the band play, there’s a clear focus to Sohrab Habibion and Michael Jaworski’s songwriting, reaching into post-hardcore’s most earnest elements, touches of warm folk influence, and just enough “college rock” jangle to keep things breezy. It’s “mature” but never stale, a vision of the underground in all it’s many facets.
“Tomorrow And The Day After” is the record’s second single, offering a very different look than “No Man’s Island”. While that song played with a jittery post-punk and power-pop charm, their latest single opts for more tension, the wrought state of the world seeping into knotted Americana that feels hard fought yet locked in. From the bass groove to the tightly coiled twin guitars, the band wander through their thoughts over a steady churn. With stuttering drums, surging riffs, and an unshakeable melody, SAVAK allow the structure to become subtlety tangled, burning a path into the fading distance
Catch the band on tour this Summer with Bed Maker and the triumphant return of Faraquet.
Speaking about the song, Habibion shared:
“I was in a coffee shop, where I saw a student feverishly scribbling in a used paperback and was reminded of how my mother really disliked what she considered to be the desecration of books. “I don’t understand why they can’t just use a notebook—now it’s ruined for everyone else!” Years later I was a buyer at a used bookstore, where the policy was strict about not purchasing anything that had been written in. But I also started to see it from the other side. If the book is yours, then who cares what you do with it? Plus it was kind of fascinating to see what was worthy of highlighting or commenting through a stranger’s eyes.
The angle of the song is to look at that gray area between points of view and how confusing it is when you can’t understand the opposing position. The shadows, the misunderstandings, the sense that there is supposed to be a singular and correct take on the world. But these things change. The way we see history is likely quite different from those who experienced it. And the way people tomorrow see what we are living through now will probably not line up perfectly either. Today’s heroes = tomorrow’s heretics… and vice versa.
There’s also a bit of inspiration taken from and a reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The video for this song gives a nod to books that are being banned. Even a cursory look at the titles in question reveals what a woefully racist, xenophobic, and transmisogynistic the idea is, let alone the flagrant attempt to curtail our freedom of expression.”