Pitchfork

Have you seen Les Savy Fav play live? For more than a decade now, fans of the Rhode Island-spawned rockers' scorchingly impressive recorded output have compared the band's albums to their gigs, and sighed a little bit to themselves when the discs couldn't quite bring the same catharsis. Greedy bastards. So if a live album was probably inevitable eventually, unveiling the forthcoming After the Balls Drop at a time when Les Savy Fav continue to reach for new heights of jagged, expertly played guitar rock-- dispelling fears of a potential breakup with Pitchfork's #44 album of 2007, Let's Stay Friends, and even donning their capes for a TV network owned by General Electric-- well, that's piling "holy shit" on top of "fucking awesome." Or something.

With its echoey, water-torture lead guitar, urgent rhythm section, and frontman Tim Harrington's hoarse, deceptively eloquent shouts, "The Sweat Descends" remains one of the highlights of the Les Savy Fav catalog. Compiled on singles collection Inches, the song wound up at #27 on our top singles list that year. The live version bristles with the energy produced by that chemical bond between an audience and performers at the top of their game, Harrington's exhortations occasionally obscuring the lyrics (we've got last year's Art of Manila cover for those, anyway) as the guitar notes grow from a trickle to a scalding torrent. But no, you can't see the band's famous live antics here. It's an mp3. Damn, you gotta find fault with everything.