Appropos of Trent’s traffic accident, I bring you my review of Les Savy Fav’s fantastic new album, Let’s Stay Friends, in this week’s CD Reviews (with relevant item emphasized):

LES SAVY FAV

Let’s Stay Friends

(French Kiss)

Let’s Stay Friends is Les Savy Fav’s first proper album in six years, following the brilliant singles collection Inches, an off-and-on hiatus punctuated by a handful of live shows, a couple promising Australian-only tour 7-inches, and some dispiriting talk of an ambient album (the scrapped Rabbit Trancing). The album title seems like the kind of empty platitude you might write in the yearbook of someone you never expected to see again, like “Have a great summer!” But, according to the band, it’s a sincere statement about sticking together, “a resolution to defy the forces which wear away at our innocence and enthusiasm.” So it’s a sweet sentiment for the sort-of reunion, but it’s also just a reasonable set of goals, as opposed to, say, an impossibly ambitious manifesto. The result is, fittingly, a fine but not totally triumphant album.

The album smartly references the band’s past work, though at times it begins to feel like repetition. “Pots & Pans” marches forth on restrained martial snare rolls and bright, rising guitars, telling the hopeful story of a band, like a bright side or a prequel to Inches opener “Meet Me in the Dollar Bin.” “The Year Before the Year 2000” recalls and rebukes Tim Harrington’s lyrical penchant for morbid and apocalyptic imagery (“If my dear/you think the end is near/please do check/your frontal hemisphere”) while updating the desperate dance rock of “The Sweat Descends.” “The Equestrian” is a fried, distorted rocker in the vein of “The Rodeo” or “Blackouts on Thursday,” except with less of a chorus to hold on to. Throughout, the band further polish their transcendent postpunk (“Scotchguard the Credit Card”), freak funk (“Patty Lee”), and touched balladry (“Comes & Goes”)—Seth Jabour’s guitar work is especially striking, as always—without breaking too much new ground (though there is some flute on the existential meditation “Brace Yourself” and some merry brass flourishes on closer “The Lowest Bitter”).

Harrington is as hyperactive and witty a lyricist as ever. On “Raging in the Plague Age” (previously available on an Australian tour 7-inch), he manages to simultaneously send up AC/DC and Edgar Allan Poe (“I used to hold the biggest balls/deep inside my castle walls”) while revisiting a favorite subject—living it up in the shadow of death—illustrated here as a bubonic, medieval kegger. On the moon-howling, drum machine–driven “What Would Wolves Do?” Harrington reflects on a mythological early human past (“We saw the ocean and drank it down/’cause we were giants… we slept with lions”) as an extended metaphor for faded youth (the inverse of the band’s chief theme).

Let’s Stay Friends doesn’t quite live up to the years of pent-up expectation after only a couple weeks of listening—which is to say it’s not immediately my new favorite Fav—but it’s growing on me rapidly. Sure, guys, let’s stay friends. ERIC GRANDY

The album continues to grow on me. If I was writing this review today, it would easily get 3.5 stars. Hang in there, Trent.