Re-Hearing The 90s #1

by Can't Go Home Again

Les Savy Fav – The Cat and the Cobra (Frenchkiss, 1999)

A band of unbound victims of the everyday, crawling from under slack with grimy bags of surplus energy, heaving troublesome reserves, spraying at least the first five rows with their disease, every night. Hear them as a Pixies with a missing peg, a Fugazi stripped squealing of all ponderousness, a Pavement jolted sharp with adrenalin shots, though still flashing a residual awkwardness of gait. Or hear as songs written from the abyssal edge of a self-confected high, Tim Harrington unmanageably brimming, desperate to birth a whole steaming pot of something over the springy lattice formed by Seth Jabour’s hypnotically circling riffs, and the rhythm section’s pleasingly constricted pinball power. Thrill as they try to throw the frenzy further away in sudden accelerations, but, as the Associates once sang, it bounced back, bounced back, bounced back, (and there’s some affinity here with that very different band’s peculiar blend of ebullience and gravitas, their sense of the jeopardy in courting elation). Although it’s only ‘99 their world already feels very much like ours both means-less and overwrought, opulently mediated, too sticky close and wildly blown open. So hear it as a way to heat-fuse a life of winking parts let fall to the dirty floor, of glowing/glowering fragments, the very attempt a sort of cleansing derangement. It’s very silly early or far too fucking late, but play in the band to flee the giant dust moats in yr minuscule nyc digs, to metabolise the landslide mess of days, to clear a charged circle for dance, for joy, or just for now, our small, allocated nows. C’est ce que raconte Les Fav, mon mate, and this is their best record by far, a spritzy, spiked tonic, a compelling itch, a ravaging fun ride, an absolute gas.