Les Savy Fav - ‘No Sleeves’
- Inches
- Tightly knit collection of new school punk by Les Savy Fav with absolutely bizarre interludes and a surprising degree of polish.
- Buy it at insound!
This is a little bit of an experiment.
For months, I’ve had iTunes set to wake me up to a completely random song. I’ve got about 18,000 songs to choose from, and there’s certainly a lot of crap mixed in with all of the decent stuff. More often than not, however, I’ll find that iTunes is better at picking songs to wake to completely at random than I am when I’m trying to find something good.
I was already up at 5:50 today when iTunes kicked into gear, but I wasn’t let down today. “Inches” is a bit of fun new-punk from an album that’s more of the same. The song leads in with a heavy yet simple bass line that flows through the track. The soaring guitars give it almost a U2-like quality, without ever running the risk of being mistaken for U2.
The New York band’s sound is overwhelmingly punk without ever sounding sloppy. Sure, Sid Vicious would probably be spinning in his grave if he could hear this, but in today’s world of tight production, even indy labels can’t seem to let an album slip out the door without a certain degree of polish. Not that this is a bad thing; in fact it’s great. That extra bit of shine is what makes this such a listenable album. It’s light, yet punk — the kind of music that radio executives should be drooling over, but thankfully, for the sake of music fans, aren’t.
