Les Savy Fav - OUI, LSF

The opening track on this sixth full-length by Les Savy Fav, ’Guzzle Blood’, plays like a war cry, with a synth line that shrieks like a siren throughout. Quickly, you find yourself wishing it hadn’t taken them over a decade to locate this incendiary sense of urgency; the NYC five-piece are one of the most consistently raucous live propositions in the modern history of indie rock, something that sometimes overshadowed how intricate, melodic and incessantly adventurous their recorded output could be. Their albums always burst at the seams with creative energy, as if they had more ideas than they did places to put them; as the years ticked by, the concern was not just whether they’d return but if such a ferocious spark could ever properly be reignited. The good news is that ‘OUI, LSF’ is the sound of a band fully recharged.

It takes the kind of chutzpah we’ve come to expect from Les Savy Fav to return after such a long lay-off with surely their most avowedly experimental album to date, one that finds room for everything from ‘Legendary Tippers’, which imbues their punk blueprint with groove, to woozy, off-kilter wanders down strange new avenues, as on ‘Nihilists’ or instrumental interludes like ‘Dawn Patrol’. Then, there’s the disarming likes of piano ballad ‘Don’t Hide Me’ or the deceptively despondent pop stomper ‘Somebody Needs a Hug’, both of which suggest that frontman Tim Harrington – so often the court jester - has embraced the catharsis that comes with vulnerability. ‘OUI, LSF’ is a storming return that suggests that, far from having run out of steam, the possibilities for Les Savy Fav are again endless.