If "Meet Me in the Dollar Bin" had been the last song Les Savy Fav ever released, the band would have written themselves a fitting epitaph: "We got old, but we got good/ And we did all we said we would." After the 2004 release of their excellent, career-spanning singles compilation Inches (which featured "Meet Me in the Dollar Bin" as its lead track), Les Savy Fav fans feared the band was ready to call it a day. Band members moved apart, live shows became infrequent, and the chances of a proper follow-up to the 2001 full-length Go Forth seemed slim-to-none. So when Les Savy Fav announced that they'd be releasing a new album this year, I was pleasantly surprised; when they revealed Let's Stay Friends' solicitous and slyly breakup-referencing title and formidable roster of famous guests... I wasn't as sure. Les Savy Fav are nothing if not smart and self-aware-- could Let's Stay Friends be an expertly plotted careerist cash-in?
Thankfully not. Les Savy Fav have had numerous opportunities to cast themselves as trendsetters and reap the subsequent rewards, and they've always known better. Their gritty, angular guitar-punk opus Rome (Written Upside Down) was released a year before the Liars' They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument On Top. The more refined, disco-inflected Go Forth was released two years before the Rapture's Echoes. Les Savy Fav never stuck around to pillage any of the bandwagons they may have set in motion, and they have a stunningly consistent and bullshit-free discography to show for it.
So what more can you expect from a band that's done everything they said they would? On album opener "Pots and Pans", Harrington answers this question in no uncertain terms: "Let's tear this whole place down and build it up again/ This band's a beating heart and it's nowhere near its end." Rather than listlessly rehashing their past achievements or attempting a superficial overhaul, Les Savy Fav are doing something much riskier: They're trying to become a better band.
"The Equestrian" fulfills Harrington's promise in both its intensity and its ingenuity, building from a rough-and-tumble verse to a fluid, slinky chorus. While Les Savy Fav once relished in the abrupt and the discontinuous, Let's Stay Friends reveals a surprising amount of elegance. It also shows the band more interested than ever in playing at contrasts and exploring their own range. Harrington always seemed to focus more on rhythm than on melody, but here he proves himself a capable and versatile vocalist. On album standout "Patty Lee", Harrington sings the first verse in a playful falsetto and the second in a gravelly yelp. Guitarist Seth Jabour matches him hook for hook, spinning out inventive and melodic guitar lines that owe as much to Archers of Loaf as they do to oft-referenced influence Gang of Four.
Les Savy Fav have always covered a lot of stylistic ground, but in an effort to further diversify, Let's Stay Friends sometimes finds them focusing on material that doesn't always play to their strengths. The effort is commendable, but the results are mixed: The album's biggest gamble-- and, unfortunately, biggest flop-- is "Comes and Goes", a largely drumless duet with Fiery Furnaces frontwoman Eleanor Friedberger. While the prospect of a full-on Les Savy Fav ballad is intriguing, "Comes and Goes" sees them struggling to incorporate too many unfamiliar elements and winding up with an uncharacteristically dull experiment not far removed from the Fiery Furnaces' less schizophrenic material.
As its title cleverly suggests, Let's Stay Friends rewards long-term interest; it's not Les Savy Fav's most immediate record, nor is it their best. It's the product of a band willing to sacrifice the "holy shit!" moment for the fully formed song, to be ambitious without necessarily sounding ambitious, and to become better at the things they don't do best. If Les Savy Fav are as far ahead of the curve here as they've been in the past, the next couple of years seem to be shaping up well.
