Les Savy Fav

Root for Ruin

(Frenchkiss)

Record Review by Angel M. Baker

Les Savy Fav's fifth LP release, Root for Ruin, opens with “Appetites,” a reminder that the Brooklyn punk artsters still have their raging cravings, sexual, musical, and illicit.  The “tell-not-show” lyric seems like a plea from the super-scenester rockers, though, as the rest of the record has a tidier feel than the earlier LSF incarnations, which were dirtier and sweatier than a Manhattan subway in summer.  Not that Root for Ruin isn’t dirty and sweaty.  It is.  But the dirt feels swept over and the sweat smells more like an Axe commercial than Tim Harrigton’s undercarriage.   And the cleaned-up scrubbed-down version serves LSF well.   
 
Root for Ruin is a solid showing (many reviewers have called it a victory lap) and it really brings more of the same frenetic, kinetic, contagious energy that we welcome from LSF.  A band whose lyrics and antics are dripping with so many drug allusions we fear we could literally get that phone call at any hour of the night that LSF od’d on its own hype, this record is slightly more calmed down (but really on a scale of 1 to 10, records one through four being 100s, Root for Ruin is at about a 90 in terms of unabridged free-roaming chaos) and listenable time and time again. 

LSF hasn’t totally grown up here, though.  “Sleepless in Silverlake” and “Excess Energies” don’t even play like an old LSF, they play like a lazy LSF.  This writer’s disdain for the former isn’t solely due to the fact that she lives in Silverlake, either.   The attempt at creating an East v. West coast rivalry is as tired as I am of defending Angelenos from the stereotype that we all have bleached teeth and tanned tits (their lyrics, not mine).  The slowed down cut is ill-fitting on the record and the campy attack is a disservice to the maturing LSF sound to which it is a pleasure to listen. 

Likewise, “Excess Energies” is bogged down by its bash-down-the-walls teen-angst lyrics that are better served by a more mainstream band like, say, Blink-182 or Green Day.  Maybe Harrington’s channeling his former youth but lyrics like, “I never felt so cheap in my whole life, I am only 17, Someone kick me in the teeth, I could use some enemies, I have excess energy” just feel cliché in comparison to the typically palpable anger, frustration, and lust that come from him. 

LSF is back in true form on the record’s highlights, “Poltergeist” and “Dear Crutches.”  “Poltergeist” is a root-less rambler that unravels slowly to a blistery plea to burn it all down.  Whatever the “it” is, we’re with LSF in this ghostly haunting number.   This track shows LSF can slow it down and maintain the same primal, frothy animus as the other, more pounding drives.   “Dear Crutches” has Harrington at his most vulnerable.   Syrupy (but gorgeous) lyrics like, “Why don’t you stay a while and be hammock for my heart?” don’t wax smug, they balance the record’s otherwise testosterone-intense raucousness (e.g. the gritty “Let’s Get Out Of Here,” that delivers as straightforward as possible pure sexual wanting, sans sugar coating in any form).  It also carries the record’s most danceable beat. 

Root for Ruin doesn’t dig that deeply for many new ideas but it has these seasoned artists reaching a refined level that will bring new listeners to the ever-unpredictable experiment that is a live LSF show.