Les Savy Fav
Let’s Stay Friends
(Frenchkiss)
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
****
Though Les Savy Fav has been around for nearly 10 years, Let’s Stay Friends boasts a band at its height, said Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone. Among the forefathers of New York’s current indie scene, these art-punk pioneers are most celebrated for their outlandish live shows. which usually begin with frontman Tim Harrington—a “human tornado,” with his “grizzly beard and Falstaffian bulk”—dressed as a pirate and end with him naked. Let’s Stay Friends is “their first album to truly stand up outside the live arena,” said Rosie Swash in the London Observer. Packed full of werewolf howls (“What Would Wolves Do”) and party anthems about abduction (“Patty Lee”), it “requires no showmanship to bring it to life.” The band had worried fans recently by moving apart and playing less. Even this album’s title, when first announced, seemed to reference a breakup in the near future. Harrington calms everyone’s fears with opener “Pots and Pans,” said Matt LeMay in Pitchforkmedia.com. At the song’s close, he yelps out: “This band’s a beating heart and it’s nowhere near its end.” Though the band “once relished in the abrupt and discontinuous,” here they cultivate their gnarled guitar-punk. Let’s Stay Friends confounds with its considerable range and sophistication and reveals a band that is “ambitious without necessarily sounding ambitious.” It’s the sound of Les Savy Fav “trying to become a better band.”
