Check out the excellent new animated video from Savages for their track “Marshal Dear” off the band’s debut LP Silence Yourself out now on Matador. Savages’ guitarist Gemma Thompson developed and storyboarded her idea for the video while inspired by a scene in Kurt Vonnegut‘s Slaughterhouse Five. In it, the novel’s main character, former World War II soldier Billy Pilgrim, seems to experience time moving backwards. Watching an air force bomber on television, the plane reverses itself to recollect the bombs it had dropped before flying home where they are finally dismantled back into their component parts.
Thompson says she searched for several months to find a suitable animator for the project, before discovering the London animation director Gergely Wootsch, a recent graduate of RCA. In talking about the new video for “Marshal Dear,” Thompson helps to unpack the video’s layers of meaning by explaining:
“This scene would replay in my head and I could imagine it as an animation of lines flowing into each other, much like early hand-drawn animation created to accentuate a musical score. I also thought it was beautiful how Billy tries to right the process of destruction and how this echoed the true story of the character in the song Marshal Dear – Field Marshal Rommel’s attempted assassination of Hitler to end the Second World War which resulted in him being forced to take his own life to spare those of his family. We worked on bringing the character of the factory worker into the fore so that the animation now focused on the role of the woman working in the factory and the bomb itself as she realises her hand in the destruction.”
Savages play the Pitchfork Festival in Paris this Thursday, before embarking on a tour of the UK and Europe, so don’t miss the dates below.
Savages Live:
October
31st Pitchfork Festival, Paris, France
November
2nd Iceland Airwaves, Reykjavik, Iceland
5th Concorde 2, Brighton, UK
6th The Forum, London, UK
7th Trinity, Bristol, UK
9th Ritz, Manchester, UK
10th Classic Grand, Glasgow, UK
11th Vox, Leeds, UK
16th Crossing Border, den Haag, The Netherlands
17th Crossing Border, Antwerp, Belgium
18th Doornroosje, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
20th Gebaude 9, Cologne, Germany
21st Zoom, Frankfurt, Germany
22nd Kesselhaus, Berlin, Germany
23rd Gruenspan, Hamburg, Germany
25th Strom, Munich, Germany
26th Flex, Vienna, Austria
28th Les Docks, Lausanne, Switzerland
29th Mexefest, Lisbon, Portugal
December
1st Sonic City Festival, Kortrijk, Belgium
2nd Den Atelier, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
3rd, Paradiso, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
January
27th Laneway Festival, Auckland, New Zealand
31st Laneway Festival, Brisbane, Australia
February
1st Laneway Festival, Melbourne, Australia
2nd Laneway Festival, Sydney, Australia
7th Laneway Festival, Adelaide, Australia
8th Laneway Festival, Perth, Australia
