Les Savy Fav
Inches
Frenchkiss / Popfrenzy, 2004
I'm cheating a bit this week by writing about myself. Well, writing about myself more than usual, anyway. Last week I penned a rather unhinged review of Auckland's The Mint Chicks at The Gaelic Club for Mess+Noise. It was inflammatory and over-the-top and I was terrified of sending it off to print, because I'd become so caught up in this idea of "writing properly", in case The Age or whatever didn't let me in later on. But screw 'em.
Anyway, the review was about how we – both fans and critics alike – should be wanting more, and should stop being frightened of offending musicians or their bloody publicity agents. It met with a more passionate response than anything I've written in years. But there was something else in that review that was overshadowed by the politics, and that's what I'd like to talk about here: the feeling behind it, the feeling that I've only just found a way to put into words, and that was crystallised that Friday night at The Gaelic.
There's a song by Les Savy Fav – the only other punk band besides The Mint Chicks I know of worth a damn at the moment – called 'Yawn, Yawn, Yawn'. It's so brilliant and explosive that I can't really do it justice here. "Take a deep breath and waste sweet seconds/ The late day beckons, and if you save it, it will slip away," are the first lines of the chorus. And then, when the New York band's singer Tim Harrington really lets loose: "Spend seven nights like Saturday!/ Yawn, yawn, yawn, we're all long gone/ And if we get lucky we'll be dead by dawn/ So let's g-g-get it on!/ I WANT TO G-G-GET IT ON!"
There's a certain nihilism in that song like no other I know of. It captures a feeling hard to explain: that miserable, cursed feeling of being damned, as if you could wind up in hell at any moment and no one would bother going to your funeral, and like if you could only find the perfect expression of that feeling in rock and roll – and where else would you find it? – then you'd either be cured, or killed, in the flames. See, I get that feeling a lot.
The last paragraph suggests there some kind of sadness in Les Savy Fav's music. Honestly, I've never noticed though I'm definitely intrigued to hear more about this.
ReplyDeletehmm. word re: saying stuff
ReplyDeletei sense a desperation in some of les savy favs lyrics and chords
Yeah, desperation is probably a better word than sadness.
ReplyDeleteIt's in these lines, especially:
"If we get lucky we'll be dead by dawn/ So let's get it on!"
It's that thing of feeling utterly damned, like nothing you did would matter -- or even, like the song says, you wished you were dead -- and so you may as well have a good time while you're waiting for the inevitable.
In The Mint Chicks review, which this column was about, that's the feeling I was talking about when I said "a fantastic punk band will make the audience feel like the entire building is going to cave in on them".
I hear that same feeling in some of The Mint Chicks' songs, most notably, 'Ockham's Razor'.
I have no idea if this comment provided any insight. I'm so busy this week that I've run out of words.
Another Les Savy Fav song with this feeling is 'The Sweat Descends'.
ReplyDelete"Wake me up when we get to heaven/ Let me sleep if we go to hell."
Brilliant.