Record Review

Les Savy Fav

After the Balls Drop
(Frenchkiss; 2008)

Rating: 35%
Combined Rating: 46%

I love Les Savy Fav, but didn’t need to listen to After the Balls Drop first to know that a live Les Savy Fav album is a bad idea. The Fav have never been known for tight performances or surprising improvisations so much as the twin entertainments of listening to Harrington’s absurd stage banter while watching him pour dish soap down his pants. But listen to it I did, and I was right in assuming that it’s essentially a Tim Harrington comedy album featuring jokes without punch lines, melodic songs with melodies removed, and an ever-present grunge guitar tone. After the Balls Drop has all the lasting power of a curiosity, and it isn’t even all that curious.

An early New Year’s day set, After the Balls Drop was recorded at 3 AM for a crowd of wasted New Yorkers at the Bowery Ballroom, and sounds like the kind of party that would have been a lot more fun to be at than to listen to. The band is sloppy, and Harrington’s voice is a hoarse scream from the beginning; sleek, danceable numbers like “Patty Lee” and “The Sweat Descends” are reduced to grating, clumsy messes, and there are many moments when Harrington references something occurring in front of him, leaving the album listener out of it. If there’s a high point, it may be “Who Rocks the Party” from The Cat and the Cobra (1999), a favorite that is only half strangled to death by treble yelps.

The album’s main attraction is the five song encore of covers: CCR’s “Hey Tonight,” the Pixies’ “Debaser,” the Misfits’ “Astro Zombies,” Nirvana’s “Sliver” and Love’s “Everybody’s Gotta Live.” Each are imbued with the album’s invasive car crash guitar playing, with “Debaser” making the additional argument that there’s screaming, and then there’s Frank Black’s screaming, and they are not at all equal. “Sliver” isn’t even steady enough to understand, with Harrington probably hanging upside down or jogging around, his voice finally an out-of-breath attempt at volume.

Of course it’s ridiculous for me to criticize the out of key backup singing on a Pixies cover, or a two-chord Nirvana song performed poorly, when they come in the wee hours of the morning and probably after many hours of heavy drinking—but then, is it any more ridiculous than expecting me, dead sober, to listen to it months later? After the Balls Drop is less than fans-only material; it’s a mostly unlistenable document appealing only to the people who were fortunate enough to be there.

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