Les Savy Fav — Studio C

Les Savy Fav concert preview, The Badger Herald, April 11, 2002

Les Savy Fav, Brooklyn-based new wave-rock heroes (or so the group’s Web site claims), arrives in Madison Friday, headlining at The Catacombs Coffee House, 731 State St.

The seventh live date of a recently launched U.S. tour, Les Savy Fav has toured almost continuously in support of its third full-length disc, the exquisite and incendiary Go Forth.

“We’ve been touring for the past four months, pretty much straight,” bassist Syd Butler said in a recent interview. “I think that helps generate a lot of buzz. I think a lot of bands play one or two times a year and it really doesn’t do anything. Most of the successful bands that we know of toured for five or six years straight.”

The effort seems to be paying off. Last month LSF returned from a month-long European tour, a tour Butler calls the band’s most successful. “We just got a lot of positive feedback and a lot of energy. People seem to be excited about coming to our shows, which is nice.”

Les Savy Fav is making a fitful passage from small-club hopeful to medium-size contender. In Europe, co-headliners Mars Volta, one of two At the Drive spinoffs, undoubtedly inflated turnout. Now touring with lesser-known label-mates The Apes, a raucous Washington D.C-based four-piece, LSF is slated to play venues as diverse as the 100-capacity Catacombs and the 1,100-capacity Metro in Chicago. The Chicago date looks to be the more anomalous of the two.

“The show at the Metro, I’m a little nervous about,” Butler admits. “It’s a pretty big venue.” But he adds: “We’ve done very well in Chicago the last couple times we’ve come through. Five hundred capacity seemed to be spilling over.”

In Madison, the band has no such track record to speak of. A basement show notwithstanding, Les Savy Fav has not made Madison a regular stop on its frequent tours. That leaves it up to a select few in town to spread word of the band’s fierce live shows.

“It’s such an outlet of energy,” Butler explains. “We get really confused when bands don’t give you that outlet. We all grew up going to rock shows and seeing all these amazing bands, and they gave you so much and they gave you something to take home. We have the same sort of values.”

Playing so many live dates, supporting a record that’s already been in stores six months and including no non-recorded songs in the set list, touring might get a little old. But for Butler it hasn’t happened yet. “Every time we play the songs live we manipulate them, so every time it’s fresh. We try to create something out of nothing, at that time, so each unique live show is special.”

And touring, of course, is just plain fun. “I think it’s great,” says Butler. “We really enjoy it. It’s sort of like summer camp. You get excited to go to camp, you’re at camp, you’re having a great time. But you start to miss your own bed. But once you get home and sleep in your bed, you kind of go, ‘Okay, I’ve done that, let’s go back to camp.’”

When the band does return from “camp,” there is plenty to do. Butler, owner of French Kiss Records, has e-mails to answer, phone calls to make and frequent trips to the post office and bank to keep the label running smoothly. Singer Tim Harrington works for an advertising company, while guitarist Seth Jabour is an illustrator, and drummer Harrison Haynes tends bar (with the exception of Haynes, all, in very un-camp-like fashion, continue working on the road, via e-mail and cell phones).

And there are studio recording sessions, an endeavor requiring with each new record ever-increasing expenditures of time and money. “The old records [3/5 and The Cat and The Cobra, both on Pennsylvania-based label The Self-Starter Foundation] were more rigid; we just sort of recorded them and documented them. We didn’t understand the recording process. With Rome and Go Forth we spent more time shooting from the hip, listening to each other better. We allowed ourselves to deviate from [old] structures to create new ones. It was an exciting process.”

Phil Ek, an experienced producer-engineer (Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Love As Laughter, Unwound), nurtured that process. “We were really psyched to work with him,” Butler says. “He keeps it relaxed. It’s nice when all that money’s on the line and time’s on the line, he sort of keeps it in a nice perspective and keeps things relaxed. It’s refreshing.”

Les Savy Fav operates, as do all the bands on French Kiss (Sean Na Na, Lifter Puller, The Apes), as a collective. “It’s definitely a democracy,” says Butler. “There’s no real one songwriter. We approach our writing in an artistic way.”

Butler, like all four members (a fifth, guitarist Gibb Slife, departed after Cat), is not at all reluctant to place Les Savy Fav in an artistic context. “We all come from artistic backgrounds and I think art is a great word to use; I’d rather have someone describes us as art-punk or art-new wave or art-anything [other] than 'emo’ or something to describe our sound. We do approach [music] in an artistic way and that’s how we think.”

And what lies ahead for Les Savy Fav?

According to Butler, “We want to write music that makes us think [while] expanding our horizons. I hope for the future of the band we continue on the same path.”

So do we.