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Live or on record, their music is defined by simple tolling guitar figures, each single-mindedly pursuing its own path across the emptiness, one note, one foot at a time. Theirs could be a soundtrack for Mao's Long March, a lunatic act of faith of such heroic proportions it galvanises the revolutionary fervour of the landmass and peoples it traverses.
Each marcher is locked in his own thoughts en route to the ever-receding horizon. and just when it seems likely they'll never get there, their respective paths cross to produce a tremendous morricone-d chord that lifts them over the last rise and sends them running down the slope to victory.
Savage Republic's marching music is a fabulous feat of endurance, variously stoic, trancelike and elating. Their titles tell all: "Mobilisation", "March Or Die", "Exodus", "Procession", "Trudge", "Trek", "Siege", "Assembly", "Year of Exile"... If rock is usually cars and guitars, Savage Republic are deserters from the cause. They are the music's first dromomaniacs - compulsive walkers. Walk, don't run, and then Insha'Allah, Godspeed. Their largely instrumental long marches bring out the best in Savage Republic; obduracy, in a word.
"I think it works better when we keep it simple, best when we realise our limitations," posits Greg Grunke. "We can't play solos like Eddie Van Halen. That each of us has the ability to play very simple stuff has lead to an ensemble way of playing. We work together a combination of simple patterns, rhythm and melody kinda intertwined so you can't say which element is more or less important."
But it's not all foot-in-mao disease. Elsewhere, Savage Republic evoke the nomad's land where the city fizzles out in the desert scrub ("Spice Fields"). Then there's the Islam imagery and Middle Eastern musical motifs, which their American audiences find so unsettling in light of the hostage crisis.
"We work with a lot of minor scales, minor modes," explains Thom Fuhrmann. "Depending on the rhythmic emphasis it could sound Arabic, Irish folksy or Greek. There are certain elements common to all. We just like to compound drones, repetitions and interlocking patterns into a greater whole."
If their great strength is their evocative, enduring instrumentals, which at first suspend time and then choreograph it in a manner contemporary composers like latterday Reich can only snooze about, they have also written some fine songs which dramatise the peculiar malaise corroding the American spirit. A favourite is the unforgettable hardcore slogan "You have come to teach but we have come to eat" from the first LP Tragic Figures. But others aspire to something higher, something approaching hardboiled poetry, like Philip Drucker's "Film Noir". Its lyric brilliantly diagnoses the loneliness of those conscripted to professions of violence: "When danger calls I have to answer/I walk the streets like a human cancer/There's a side of me I hope you never see..."
"It was about the social requirements of living in LA and the US," grins Drucker, who also works in the intermittently excellent ethnic forgers 17 Pygmies. "About the people left out in the cold by an American detective attitude. In Europe detectives deduce the answer. In the States the guy goes in and beats it out of you. The lyric tries to get down that attitude. I should have dedicated it to Mickey Spillane. You have to understand that I think he's a total moron, a racist, sexist pig. He's also the seventh most popular author in America."
When you look at America from that angle, Savage Republic's desire for absolute autonomy makes even more sense. Furled in their own flag, minting their own stamps, wrapped in sovereignty's trappings, Savage Republic bring a whole new meaning to the word independent. They're the first American group ever to cede from the Union.
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