Les Savy Fav, Root For Ruin
A loud guitar band for people who like guitar bands and also for people who ordinarily don't
Like Nirvana or the Pixies or Hüsker Dü or the Stooges, Les Savy Fav is a loud guitar band for people who like guitar bands and also for people who ordinarily don't. Smarter, funnier, tighter and weirder than the competition, this Brooklyn quintet summons universal desperation in idiosyncratic form — riffs both savage and yet geometric, rhythms that both punch and groove, insane ranting that also delivers an intellectual tickle. And, above all, this band boasts both charisma and its opposite.
"We still got our appetites," rages frontman/madman Tim Harrington on a brutal opening cut that serves as both manifesto and summation. Fifteen years in, LSF remain hungry — for experience, sex, success, love and all the rest. While his cohorts sprint in interlocking syncopation, Harrington pushes and pulls his vocal rhythm both on and maddeningly off the beat — as if the desire of which he sings cannot be regulated or contained.
To put it another way, Les Savy Fav is both more in and out of control than ever: "Dirty Knails" ricochets between devotion and blasphemy, while the one-two punch of "Let's Get Out of Here" and "Lips 'n Stuff" ooze unchecked libido. Harrington has no use for the rambling indie abstraction; rhymes abound, syllables fall in strict meter: Check "High 'N Unhinged," his riposte to a dismissive, social climbing lover, where he sings "You're sick of yourself/ I'm pretty sick of you, too/ You think that cutting me out/ Can fix the things that you do." Such discipline helps even impulsive tracks like "Poltergeist" get over, while uncharacteristically prose-like lyrics contrast sharply with the instrumental sweetening of the ballad-like but emotionally barbed "Dear Crutches." Juggling opposites while remaining unbalanced is Les Savy Fav's forte.
