Les Savy Fav play at Neumo’s tonight. If you’ve seen them before, you’re going, duh. If you’ve never seen them before, you need to go. Fuck Monotonix. Fuck Comeback. Fuck the Belmont. Les Savy Fav is one of the best bands, live or otherwise, going right now. Do not miss this show.

To see Harrington’s philosophy in practice, one need look no further than Les Savy Fav’s notoriously unhinged live shows. Besides their kinetic postpunk and ingenious lyrics, it’s probably Harrington’s unpredictable live antics that the band are best known for. At previous Seattle shows, Harrington has: climbed rafters, cut locks of hair from front-row audience members’ heads to wear as a moustache/toupee, shoved a brick in his spandex tights, built a catwalk into the audience out of Neumo’s stage blocks in midsong, and chewed up a mouthful of dollar bills and French-kissed them over to an audience member (me—I spat the bills back at him). Each show is an improvised explosion of low art and high spirits, magic tricks made out of broom-closet props, an ordinary rock show made weirdly transcendent, a bunch of songs about death and squalor turned into something tenacious and vital.

Harrington is more demure about their live act: “It’s important for it to have a half-assed quality to it—not musically, but in terms of the performance—like, can you have a cardboard box be the main centerpiece of a really amazing live show? That always seemed cooler to us than having like a professionally manufactured show. Like, the Tommy Lee upside-down drum kit is really awesome, but for the money, anyone could have that.”

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