Les Savy Fav - Let’s Stay Friends

It can be a rocky road sometimes, but alt-art-rock’s avant-garde survivors Les Savy Fav know all about that. Following a brief sabbatical and a career-defining performance at All Tomorrow’s Parties this year, the NYC quartet have laid down this neat 12-song set for their fourth full-length album, and they seem to have come good. “Before a feast I was a famine” chirrups Tim Harrington. It seems the break has done them good.

Take lead single ‘What Would Wolves Do?’ as an example. There’s a clicking, retro urgency that bears reference to now-defunct trucker-cum-yarn-spinners Grandaddy, a swirling, faux-nu-gaze posette akin to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and the robotic rhythms of The Strokes. And it’s very good. Also, the desolate meets the bopping on ‘Patty Lee’ – a cranking mix of the post-love rock-arounds presented by Pixies and the post-everything nonchalance of Talking Heads, who allegedly attended the same art school as Les Savy Fav.

That said, ‘Let’s Stay Friends’ is never going to be seen as a classic. Here, the intricate balance between angular art-rock and whirring indie-cult Americana has been judged less effectively than, for example, 1999’s ‘The Cat and the Cobra’. ‘Comes&Goes’, lagging at the tail-end of the album, whines like an over-produced Magnetic Fields b-side. If there’s anything worse than sounding peeved, it’s having other people think you’re trying too hard to sound peeved.

Fortunately, the high points outnumber the low points on this progressive release. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but Les Savy Fav never set out to do that. They’re challenging, funky and thought-provoking, and go far in arguing that now is a rich period for the American college radio stalwarts. It’s unlikely that they’ll receive the relative acclaim of The Hold Steady’s geek-done-good epic ‘Boys and Girls in America’, but ‘Let’s Stay Friends’ is very likeable. If you like that sort of thing.