Review Summary: Root For Ruin is a good album, but it's just a little too familiar and basic to be great
Root For Ruin doesn't tread any new ground for Les Savy Fav, but, at this point in their career, why
should a band like Les Savy Fav tread any new ground? They're about as established as an indie/post-punk-revival band can get in these days of blogs and Mediafire and trendy, soon-to-be-defunct s
hit like Altered Zones; hell, they're only a few more solid albums away from being an institution. And
Root For Ruin is just basically a
solid album, finding the band whittling down the varied
Let's Stay Friends into its bare-bones essentials, leaving behind a swirling melting pot of the chaotic, of the catchy, of the danceable, all blending together so finely it's hard even to see the individual ingredients, sometimes to a fault.
It's so smooth, this record, that it's sometimes
too smooth, to the point to being slight.
Root For Ruin is such a tight, focused post-punk record that discovering its more thrilling moments -- like when "Let's Get Out of Here" condenses into little more than shouted declarations of its title and discordant, chiming riffs, or how much cooler the buzzsaw guitars and ominous vocals of "Poltergeist" sound after every subsequent listen -- can take some time. That isn't to say
Root For Ruin is inaccessible; it's far from it. In fact, with Tim Harrington's vocals cleaner and his songwriting more direct than ever, some of
Root For Ruin is catchy enough to deliver on a much-deserved radio breakthrough that's eluded the band for years. It's just that much of
Root For Ruin, especially the more sluggish and same-y middle section between high-octane thrashers "Dirty Knails" and "Excess Energies", is so straightforward and by-the-numbers that it can be hard to find much to really care about.
But when
Root For Ruin hits, man, it really hits hard. Songs like "Clear Spirits" and "Excess Energies", in particular, offer some of the most thrilling choruses and moments of any song I've heard from 2010 to date. I guess I was proven wrong, though: Les Savy Fav do, in fact, need to progress in order to stay interesting, or else they just get a little flaccid, a little too disengaging. But even if
Root For Ruin is little more than a reaffirmation of a band's awesomeness, at least it's a good one.
