sxsw + upside down pumpkin.

The last time Les Savy Fav played SXSW was almost 10 years ago, in 1998, right before the Black Eyed Peas (pre-Fergie, of course)…strange bedfellows indeed. So, it’s no surprise that last Wednesday night’s showcase brought out fans old and new alike, creating a line 50 deep a full two hours before the band’s scheduled performance and prompting the local doorman to announce: “les savy fav…that’s French for: ‘we’re at capacity’”.

Pre-performance jitters aside (which included Tim Harrington making much-needed use of someone’s blackberry to look up forgotten lyrics to Superchunk’s “Precision Auto” on the Internet and feverishly scrawling them with pencil in a ragged notebook, reviewing them multiple times on-stage before they covered the track), the songs were tight and the chemistry was unmistakable. And if the fist pumps initiated by the intro to “The Sweat Descends” are any indication, Les Savy Fav still know how to bring the punk.

Plus, Tim Harrington’s antics never fail to disappoint. Part of the fun of a Les Savy Fav live set is to see what ridiculous, provocative and borderline insane sentence he’ll utter next - he’ll ask who’s from Brooklyn, from Kentucky, or whether anyone in the crowd is from “Upside-Down Pumpkin” (fully expecting everyone in attendance knows exactly what that means - I certainly don’t) right before he climbs off the stage and into the crowd, on the fence and onto the bar holding the microphone up to the bartender to fill in the blanks. And if his banter doesn’t get you, Harrington’s full-body leotard with red speedos and rainbow leggings have to. It’s so totally nuts that it almost has to be rehearsed, like good performance art, if there is such a thing. But as far as the music goes, Les Savy Fav’s first show at SXSW (they played several more day parties throughout the week) was absolutely spot-on and worth the more than thirty minutes I waited to get in the door. With old songs like “Scout’s Honor” and new ones I hadn’t yet heard, Les Savy Fav certainly seem poised to play many equally excellent live shows to come.