Les Savy Fav – Let’s Stay Friends (French Kiss / Wichita)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
'Let's Stay Friends' opening song, 'Pots and Pans', is Tim Harrington's thinly veiled autobiography. It runs thusly: band tours, nobody likes them, band keeps touring. And whilst it's not strictly true of Les Savy Fav - in emo / post rock circles, surely few bands have been more influential, or are more lauded, than they? - commercial success did elude them for their first decade as a band. The final part of that over simplistic breakdown is, however, spot on. This is the sound of a band who know that they're never going to be huge coming to terms with that very fact, and realising that it doesn't actually matter. "This band has a beating heart, and its nowhere near it's end", they sing as the only band ever to return from one of those fatal 'indefinite hiatus' things. Pavement, At The Drive-In, take note - you can be an 'unsuccessful' band, in commercial terms at least, but still be one of the world's best.
Live, that they fitted that description, and still do, was never in doubt. But there's always been a feeling amongst LSF fans that they've never managed to re-create that life changing feeling on record. Thing is, Les Savy Fav shows are so exciting that it might be impossible to ever lay that down on plastic. What they have made however is perhaps their most consistently rewarding record yet, and certainly their most accessible - references to the pop, rock, metal and indie that take up our radios are everywhere - current single 'The Equestrian' for example sits in a happy middle ground between the chugging riffage of System of a Down (yep!) and paranoid string bending and screams of Graham Coxon.
The best track here, the best Les Savy Fav track ever perhaps, is the sublime white funk of 'Patty Lee'. Here, they fulfil the album's mission statement, disregarding all the genres they've ever been aligned with and making the catchiest, most inventive, anthemic song they can think of that doesn't fit in to any of them in the process. Its funk is so tight and wild abandon so prevalent that it's truly worthy of Prince, who they semi-quote on 'The Year Before The Year 2000' ("everyone please keep trying to party like it's 1999!") which is both an instruction to listen to the Purple One more - do this - and to follow Les Savy Fav's lead when it comes to never listening to anyone when they say you're too old to do something.
In fact, I'm inexplicably determined to big up the resurgent Les Savy Fav by continuing to compare bits of this album to bands they're probably not often likened to, but by gum, certainly sound like. For example, boy do they sound like the Police at times - 'Brace Yourself's dubby, vaguely reggae undertones especially indicative of it. And 'What Would Wolves Do?', with its distant, reverb-y riffs and gently but incessantly hammered simple bass line, perfects what New York punk funkers Radio 4 were never able to do on any of their records when they were trying a similar thing - make a great song sound like something other than a snapshot of a certain scene in a certain town. Something universal (with a little 'u'). 'Comes and Goes', too - the strings, the way the piano arrives for the chorus, that anthemic lyric that could mean nothing or everything - it's so R.E.M. it could be on 'Green'.
Sometimes they sound like they're doing all of these things at once, and at these times, they sound like nobody other than themselves. As good at channelling the peaks of the abilities of others as they are, they're first and foremost a cracking band in their own right. Nobody for example bar LSF possesses the balls to take 'Raging In The Plague Age' as far as they take it (it's a song that feels like it covers the past ten years of post rock in two and a half minutes). Closing track 'The Lowest Bitter', too - once you've heard it a few times, you'll be on the edge of your seat waiting for that bit where the guitars double up, the brass joins them and Tim Harrington goes in to top register for the final chorus. Ohhh yeah. THERE'S the pay off!
True, it becomes easier to love things like the subsequent 'Slugs in the Shrubs' when you've personally had Tim Harrington pour a bottle of wine down your face at a gig before evening sending a note out from his mouth, as you can imagine the ensuing carnage around you when these songs get to slay a live audience, but 'Let's Stay Friends' is consistently that thing which the band have struggled to be on record before - strong enough for the lack of them physically playing the songs in front of your eyes and ears not to be too detrimental. That said, see this band live.
Yeah, no matter how much you compare them to other people who definitely aren't, Les Savy Fav are pretty much an emo band (really, let's all just f**king get over it, they are!), yet one who existed before any of those caught in the current wave. By missing it, they probably did miss out on a fair bit of acclaim (not to mention lovely, lovely money). But they survive, stronger, making genuinely relevant art like 'Let's Stay Friends', perhaps simply because they've had to do it on their own, away from the gaze of the public at large that they deserved. If only any of the bands they supposedly influenced had any concern with truly following their lead as opposed to hollowly name dropping them in interviews, they might come close to making a record as excellent as this one.
Stream three tracks from 'Let's Stay Friends' HERE.
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment