OUI, LSF
It’s always ironic hearing Tim Harrington sing pleas for human connection after a career spent exemplifying the very qualities most likely to drive others away. The megaphone-voiced frontman of Les Savy Fav quills the band’s art-punk with brash volume and hectoring sarcasm. At the band’s legendarily rambunctious live shows, he sacrifices safety and dignity alike for the sake of an unforgettable spectacle. He’s as naturally gifted a showman as punk singers come, and one of the last guys you’d assume is all that concerned with whether or not he’s dating material.
Nonetheless, as Les Savy Fav have aged into an institution, Harrington has increasingly exposed his softer side, writing often about the difficulty of maintaining close personal relationships. It can be odd, hearing the same wildman famed for stripping down to a Speedo on stage and scaling the tallest object within sight earnestly sing lines like, “It’s hard to let love in when we’re so scared of getting hurt” on the group’s sixth album OUI, LSF (on a song titled “Somebody Needs a Hug,” at that).
Released after a 14-year recording hiatus during which the group occasionally toured but mostly focused on their day jobs, including bassist Syd Butler and guitarist Seth Jabour’s gigs anchoring the unlikely house band for Late Night with Seth Meyers, OUI, LSF continues the sentimental streak that ran through its predecessor, Root for Ruin. On the tender “Dawn Patrol,” Harrington finds solace in the reassuring touch of his partner’s hand. In its somber counterpart “Don’t Mind Me,” he croons about love that’s faded into mere tolerance over time. It’s the most naked, openly weepy ballad he’s ever attempted.
One could argue that Harrington’s growing sincerity has made Les Savy Fav a better-rounded band. It’s certainly given them a wider range of moods. Yet as with Root for Ruin, OUI, LSF can’t completely shake the sense that its comedown songs are taking up space that could have been filled by bangers. Thankfully, this band can still rage convincingly when it counts: The album opens with an absolute pressure cooker, “Guzzle Blood,” which funnels their heated art-rock through the Prodigy’s five-alarm noise factory, all bleating squall and blaring horns. “Void Moon” and “Oi! Division” are both economical pit-starters, showcases for searing riffs and Harrington’s frontman-as-Russian-roulette volatility.
At times, the maturity flatters. One of Harrington’s periodic forays into Penthouse Forum territory, “Limo Scene,” calls back to the lurid sex of “The Equestrian,” but this time amid all the touching and pheromones, the detail he lingers on is a simple gesture of consent and affirmation, a whispered “I’m into this.” The album’s stabs at youthful irreverence are less graceful. With its hokey appropriations of old LL Cool J and Usher lyrics, “Legendary Tippers” pushes the band into stale dad-joke territory. It’s a nod to an earlier, sillier era of the band, a past they can’t fully let go of even though they’ve outgrown it.
Like their peer Marnie Stern, who returned from a similarly long studio hiatus last year with an album that picked up exactly where the last one left off, Les Savy Fav aren’t humoring any notions of reinvention. When you’ve got a sound this singular, this established, this irreplicable, there’s no shame in letting it ride. Still, given how time has always intrigued Les Savy Fav—their essential 2004 compilation Inches flaunted their evolution by collecting seven years of singles in reverse chronological order —it’s a little disappointing that the latest album doesn’t have more to show for the passage of so much of it. Twice the span that Inches documented has elapsed since Root for Ruin, yet OUI, LSF plays more like a continuation than a new chapter.
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