Audio By Carbonatix
Ever seen a fat, balding, bearded guy crowd-surfing on a queen-sized mattress? How about kissing random men full on the mouth while plastered in a sweaty polyester jogging suit? No? Then you’ve never seen Les Savy Fav.
Over the past nine years, this Brooklyn quartet has hauled post-punk and art rock into a realm of absurdist audacity usually reserved for people born with major parts of their brains missing. The thing is, Les Savy Fav’s frontman, Tim Harrington, is brilliant enough (not to mention big enough) to count as a one-man think tank. In other words, he’s so smart, he’s dumb. Or is it the other way around? Listen and decide for yourself: Inches is the group’s fourth full-length, but instead of a typical batch of songs, it’s a compilation of seven-inch vinyl singles that Harrington and crew have been releasing since 1995 with the intention of one day sticking them all together as a document of the band’s progress. At that it succeeds: Starting with the band’s newest single, “Meet Me in the Dollar Bin,” you can trace Les Savy Fav’s de-evolution from a Prince-getting-lovesexy-on-Liars mess to the almost-Pixies-tinted sound of its earliest recordings. In between are odd yet felicitous nods to Madonna and Brainiac, with Harrington’s high-pitched, singsong melodicism providing wry contrast to his idiot-savant rambling. On one of the disc’s numerous highlights, “The Sweat Descends,” spiny guitars ping off of dub-punk rhythms as the singer — likely clad in only a bath towel and a comb-over — warbles this sage warning: “One cocksure fox in a house of hens/My mouth will water when the sweat descends.” The next time Les Savy Fav comes to town and you witness Harrington pacing the crowd with lust on his breath and chaos in his eyes, you’ll know exactly what he means.
