Barrence Whitfield has quite a few famous fans, among them Robert Plant and Los Lobos (not to mention OffBeat‘s John Swenson, who wrote this disc’s liner notes), and I’ll say without reservation that he’s the most soulful singer that Boston’s rock ’n’ roll scene ever produced.

In the early days he was known for screaming like a maniac and whipping the band into a frenzy; nowadays he’s known for… well, pretty much the same thing—except that he’s also sung enough soul, acoustic and jump blues over the years to develop plenty of depth and maturity. Which are kept safely between the lines where they belong.

This is the third album that the mostly-original Savages (with guitarist Peter Greenberg and bassist Phil Lenker, both from garage-rock potentates the Lyres) have done since reuniting in 2010. And since they’re now with a relatively big label and have done some touring abroad, they’ve gotten real serious about not getting serious.

The main difference is that there are no obvious covers this time: Half the tunes are band-written; the others (by the likes of Kid Thomas and Mercy Baby) are such deep cuts that only the most devoted crate-diggers will know them.

The other development is the amount of sheer wildness they’ve managed to capture here: Like very few modern rock albums, it leaves you worrying about the condition of the studio and the neighbors when they got through. Greenberg’s six-string raunch eggs the singer on at every turn.

Sometimes they evoke the heyday of the Cramps; when they add some British Invasion melody it’s more like the Beatles in Hamburg with twice as many amphetamines. Just listen to something like “Katy Didn’t”—a crazed song about crazed lovemaking, which includes the line “So much a man could take, I tried to go out and make me some pancakes”—and try to absorb the fact that this band originally formed 30 friggin’ years ago.