Tim Harrington's antics at Les Sav Fav shows are legendary. The first five rows will often get wet, and I ain't takin' about water. The former webmaster of We Want the Airwaves Back, a 5 foot nothing Asian chick, briefly interviewed him immediately post-show for the zine and claims that when she said she couldn't hear him, he grabbed her by the head and spoke directly into her ear. At the show I saw, played in an alley at the Laneway Festival in Sydney, he stripped down to his underwear (dressy by his standards), revealing himself to be covered in fake sunburn and rambled incoherently for a while. During "Rome", he ran through the crowd (directly past me), climbed onto a wall and proceeded to abseil down it with the aid of one of the plants growing at the top. I'm told he didn't stick the landing as well as he appeared to and actually landed on a friend of mine nowhere near capable of supporting his weight. What does he have against short people? Anyway, it was the best festival set I'd ever seen until Neil Young played at the 2009 Big Day Out.
Even when he screams, which he's been doing less and less often these days, Harrington seems so much more restrained and thoughtful on record. Les Savy Fav's music has increasingly emphasised melody since Go Forth, but "Sleepless in Silverlake", which gently floats over the bassline for its duration, would have been inconceivable back then. Still, Root for Ruin rocks harder than 2007's Let's Stay Friends, and does so straight out of the gate with the up tempo "Appetites", which inexplicably borrows its closing phrase "I love you to the max" from Silver Jews' "Punks in the Beerlight".
Root for Ruin continues the holding pattern that Let's Stay Friends started, but is propelled along with the enthusiastic force of Les Savy Fav's early albums. Let's stay friends!
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