Name: Several Songs About Fire
Brand: A Savage

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

RT0428LP

Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2023-10-06

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

PIAS

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

0191402042818

Total Cap

Black LP

RT0428LPXE

Purple

[r28495843]

Extended format: Yes

Tip On Sleeve

0191402042801

Purple LP

RT0428CD

0191402042825

Artist

A Savage

Genre GB

Alternative / Modern

Label GB

Rough Trade

Rough Trade is a multinational label that was started by Geoff Travis in 1976 as a London record-shop. It quickly grew into an independent label and distributor, collaborating with notable labels such as 4AD, Factory Records, and One Little Indian. The label's catalogue numbering system for singles/EPs included prefixes like RT### and RTT###CD for different formats. Albums were numbered sequentially as ROUGH### with extensions for different formats.In the early 1990s, Rough Trade faced financial difficulties after expanding into the US market. The US branch was shut down and the German branch ended up in the Zomba Music Group. One Little Indian provided financing and took over the label in the UK, retaining ownership of key releases like A.R. Kane albums. Geoff Travis eventually regained control of Rough Trade around 1999–2000 and re-launched it alongside Tugboat Records.

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“I imagine myself playing these songs in a small club that is slowly burning,” says A. Savage of his second solo record, <i>Several Songs about Fire</i>. After more than a decade in New York, the co-frontman of Parquet Courts has left the city, marking his exit with a masterpiece of maturity and a worthy corollary to his first solo venture, 2017’s <i>Thawing Dawn</i>. “Fire is something you have to escape from. This album is a burning building, and these songs are things I’d leave behind to save myself.”     

Produced by John Parish on a 1” 16-track in just ten days in Bristol and studded by the support of Cate Le Bon and Jack Cooper (Modern Nature, Ultimate Painting) as well as saxophonist Euan Hinshelwood (Cate Le Bon), drummer Dylan Hadley (Kamikaze Palm Tree, White Fence), and violinist Magdalena McLean (Caroline), Savage’s outsize gifts as a lyricist and observer – a quality Parish calls “an emotional openness guarded by a laconic wit" – shine. Worrying questions of wealth and poverty, self and other, Savage displays the poet’s gift of knowing when to narrate and when to vanish, leaving the listener to their own emotional privacy rather than instructing them how to feel.     

The end result is tantamount to psychic odyssey, with “Elvis in the Army” placing us in a subterranean venue where the livid, ratifying cymbal raises the room’s blood pressure and “Mountain Time”, evoking an austere waltz playing in a desolate house, returning those listening to life. Influenced by Sybille Baier and Townes Van Zandt, Savage joins a canon of songwriters constantly dilating aperture and perspective. In rendering the signage of laundromats and threats of debt collectors as glistering and totemic as the scope of mountains, rivers, seas, and skies, Savage finds hopes and curses in equal measure.

Several Songs About Fire

Music GB

Discover Several Songs About Fire by A Savage. Vinyl records from Rough Trade. A masterpiece of maturity and emotional openness.