Les Savy Fav’s live performances are the kind of rarity one awaits with great anticipation. While the New York City-based art-punk band still tours, regular dates are few and far between — the group is more likely to play a random slate of one-offs and festivals.
Washington is one of the luckier locales in the country — Les Savy Fav is returning to the Black Cat in Washington tomorrow after only a three-year absence.
Guitarist Seth Jabour credits this lack of touring to the band members’ personal lives. Marriages and children occupy their time, and drummer Harrison Haynes has lived apart from the band for around seven years, taking residence in Durham, N.C. The distance between Haynes and the other members doesn’t affect the band’s camaraderie, however.
“This definitely isn’t as big a deal any more,” Jabour said. “We do most of our corresponding through phone calls and email and texting when it comes to just organizing things. You’ll see — when you get into your later 30s, your priorities change a little bit.”
Though chances to catch Les Savy Fav live are slim, the wait is worth it. In addition to having a catalog of energetic, punk-fueled rock songs, the band’s secret weapon is lead singer Tim Harrington. Harrington is responsible for most of the lore surrounding the band.
Harrington plays the role of an absurdist Iggy Pop: The bald but well-bearded and potbellied Harrington often ends up shirtless and is full of boundless energy and humor throughout Les Savy Fav concerts. At an April 2008 show at the Black Cat, Harrington improvised scenes from an espionage thriller between songs while the score of Michael Bay’s 1996 film The Rock played over the sound system.
This time around, the band isn’t shopping the movie rights to its concerts but rather playing in support of the five-piece’s latest album, September’s Root for Ruin. The group’s fifth album is a bit of a throwback to Les Savy Fav’s more aggressive sound of the late 1990s, as well as a tribute to the ‘90s indie rock bands that inspired Les Savy Fav.
Let’s Stay Friends, Les Savy Fav’s previous album, was a bit of a departure from the straightforward punk-rock the band had become known for. The album featured bigger pop moments and additional instrumentation, making way for more singalongs but not forgoing any potential mosh-pit moments.
The change in sound was inspired by the three-year period of little band activity between 2004’s Inches compilation and 2007’s Let’s Stay Friends. Root for Ruin is the reaction to the activity following Let’s Stay Friends.
“We got back together for Let’s Stay Friends and made an album and it just kind of came out of nowhere,” Jabour said. “What [releasing Let’s Stay Friends] did do was kind of lead us into playing a lot more shows and having to just play more music in general with each other. And by the time we got to Root for Ruin, I think it was a reaction to the musical climate that we’re in right now … when we were working on Root for Ruin, [we thought] let’s go back to our roots a little bit and make a rock and roll record, like a followup to The Cat and the Cobra.”
“We weren’t very self-aware during that time in our life,” Jabour said of Les Savy Fav’s earlier days. “Musically, I think what we were doing was good, but it didn’t really quite have the amount of sophistication and maturity our later songs take on. Musically, lyrically, however you want to look at it. … I don’t listen to The Cat and the Cobra and Root for Ruin and say, ‘Oh they sound exactly alike.’ They don’t, they don’t sound anything alike. But the spirit’s the same, and that’s what we were trying to capture.”
Root for Ruin works as a flashback in two ways: first, as a salute to Les Savy Fav’s earlier recordings and second, as an homage to the artists who first inspired the band in the mid-‘90s.
The album’s opening track, the charging “Appetites,” ends with a coda of Harrington singing “I love you to the max,” a lyric from the now-disbanded indie rock group Silver Jews. Harrington also quotes post-hardcore band Circus Lupus on “Excess Energies.”
“It was such a dour time in music,” Jabour said of the mid-‘90s. “The term indie-rock hadn’t been really quantified yet. Most monikers that get attached to music, at first we use them because we think, this is how you describe something, indie music as being an independent form of music. But then, over the decade it kind of got reinterpreted as another genre of music. You could be a major label band, making high production value videos and you could wear eyeliner but you could be like, ‘They play indie music, that’s the style of music they play.’ … [Some of the songs nod to] bygone band[s] from the ‘90s that we were listening to when we were learning how to be a band.”
For Jabour, genre titles don’t mean much. He would be content with a simple descriptor.
“We’re a bunch of men, and we play rock music,” Jabour said. “People have said art-rock in the past, that’s one of the ones I kind of like. I like any with the word rock in it.”
Les Savy Fav will play at the Black Cat tomorrow. Doors open at 9 p.m. Tickets cost $15.
rhiggins@umdbk.com
