It's a bargain, two for one, a post-punk bogof: the band they're calling the all-girl Joy Division, plus four boys named after perfumed sweets. Both Savages and Palma Violets formed less than a year ago, neither has enough material for a whole album and one is still unsigned. They're joint-headlining a national tour though, 40 minutes each at the Liverpool Leaf tonight – which means all their songs and nothing left for an encore.
Whether through pop nous or simple necessity, both bands have moved towards a PR model from days of yore. They've barely had a YouTube presence: until this week, Palma Violets had but three clips while Savages didn't put anything up till 22 May. They did a series of "secret" gigs instead, with all the right people invited. Nick Cave and Bernard Butler were spotted at a Violets show. Geoff Travis signed them down at the boys' flat in Lambeth. For Savages (also from London), there's simply no better publicity than being unsigned.
Jehnny Beth is fixed to the floor, jerking outwards from the elbows, with a narcotised frailty and a thousand-yard stare, her Joan of Arc haircut more reminiscent of Howard Devoto than Ian Curtis. She yelps out snatches of Savages' psychosexual drama (and single) Husbands – "God I wanna get rid of it, yeah/Rid of it/My house, my bed, my husbands…" – frenzied, syncopated and completely riveting.
The internet, as poor old Lana Del Rey discovered, will always reveal past lives. Jehnny Beth is Camille Berthomier from Poitiers, a star of French art movies and one half of lo-fi indie rock duo John & Jehn, who made a minor ripple in 2010 with catchy songs such as And We Run. So despite her eerily evocative punk presence, she was not in fact cracked from an egg laid by Martin Hannett in 1979. Can this kind of music, the bleeding core of authenticity as far as many people are concerned, accommodate past lives?
Savages are theoreticians; they are not claiming to be original. Founder Gemma Thompson (guitar) explained in an email when Camille joined the group: "I have been listening to a lot of Wire and My Bloody Valentine… I don't want you to get the impression I think of this as a 'new sound' or anything pretentious." But it takes real musicianship to make something that sounds this perfect. Each instrument is held within its own little vacuum. Drums are clean and deep – you hardly hear the snare; bass – played by Ayse Hassan, boyishly wrapped around her instrument – vibrates in your throat. Thompson, backlit and expressionless, coaxes a wave of feedback out of her guitar that sounds like a plane taking off.
It's hard to imagine listening to Savages on the bus. Camille seems to sing the entire gig on one note; it's not exactly sexy, it's not funny and they're not going to be rolling around in mud like the Slits. But it's the closest thing to art that "post-punk" – that baggiest of genres – has offered in a while.
Palma Violets' energy is concentrated in the charming bromance between bass player Chilli Jesson (a wire-fringed extrovert with the body of a young Elvis Costello) and singer/guitarist Sam Fryer, who opens his throat like Tears for Fears's Roland Orzabal. They tease the crowd with two short, roguish numbers (Rattlesnake Highway and All the Garden Birds) before exposing their real sound – a white-hot organ breakdown with a lurching undercarriage of spaghetti western guitar. Fryer has been compared to Jim Morrison; this makes a bit more sense on Tom the Drum ("the human race/we always win the race/in outer space…"). Space cowboys they may be, but they're not blissed-out like Spiritualized – this is strangely athletic, valiant stuff. Step Up bounces along like punkified Dire Straits or Van Halen. Similarly, in Last of the Summer Wine you can almost hear the headbands. Palma Violets reach new ecstasies of musical man-love while Camille Berthomier twitches coolly at the back of the room.
