Gig review: Hold on to Your Genre - Les Savy Fav and guests at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds


Live streams, socially distanced shows: some bands found less physically direct ways to connect with their audience during the lockdowns and restrictions of the peak Covid years.
Within a few minutes into the New York-based art-punk five-piece’s incendiary set at the sold-out Brudenell tonight, it becomes obvious that such compromises were never an option for Les Savy Fav.
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Hide AdThe band’s frontman and ringleader Tim Harrington doesn’t so much break the fourth wall separating the audience from the performers as ignore its existence altogether. Harrington spends far more time prowling amongst the capacity crowd than on the actual stage, his seemingly inexhaustible, intense drive to connect with fans meaning that even the people positioned far from the stage aren’t immune from the most welcome and exhilarating breaches of personal space that are the singer’s hallmark.
New LP OUI, LSF is the Les Savy Fav’s first in 14 years, and there is a sense of pent-up energy gushing out barely controllably in both the band’s staccato post-hardcore barrage of riffs and Harrington’s relentless roaming across the stage and the crowd: at one particularly memorable point, Harrington – having just parted the heaving moshpit, Moses-style – wounds up being carried over the heads of the audience on what looks like a disused door. Practically bursting with positive manic energy, it’s unlikely that anyone leaves tonight’s performance without a silly grin on their face.
Rocking an ample white beard dyed in shares of chemical yellow, Harrington resembles an indie rock Santa Claus who has opted to go topless to acclimatize to the venue’s sweaty conditions. Fittingly, today’s all-day multiband line-up curated by the headliners is full of gifts for connoisseurs of post-punk and artfully angular indie rock.
If a Venn diagram connecting the musical and attitudinal templates of Les Savy Fav with the other bands on the bill were compiled, some uniting factors would surely emerge: fist-clenching intensity, declamatory vocal style, righteous fury at a world teetering on cliff-edge, a fondness for volume and sharp corners. It’s hard to immediately connect the knotty hardcore screech of The None (from Leeds) and Lice (from Bristol) with the elemental instrumental post-rock monoliths of justifiably celebrated local duo Lands and Body (formerly known as That F****** Tank), but the lack of an obvious unifying theme (apart from generally consistent quality) provides a refreshing element of surprise and diversity of voices in what could otherwise become an exhausting eight hours of one-note white-knuckled noise.
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Hide AdOn stage directly before Les Savy Fav, Traams provide a perfect preamble for the untamed energy emissions of the headliners. The Chichester four-piece mash up abstract no-wave guitar racket with organically interpreted takes of the relentless, gradually escalating pulses of electronic music to thrillingly visceral effect. Vocals and song structures feature, but are really a mere sideshow to the muscular yet nimble interplay of the core trio of guitar, bass and drums. The motorik repetition that drives Traams is an oft-travelled route, but the band’s stretch of the autobahn is propelled by pure jet fuel, with any whiff of avant-rock chin-stroking instantly wiped away by sweaty dynamics.
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