No amount of pre-show research could have possibly prepared me for Les Savy Fav’s performance last night at The Echoplex. The New Yorkers first started playing together in 1995 but have been on and off since then, having made something of a recent comeback with their August 2010 release Root for Ruin. Having met many a die-hard fan, I had to know what all the fuss was about. Most of the buzz seemed focused on frontman Tim Harrington, and last night he lived up to his reputation of provoking heated debate over where exactly he fell on the spectrum between genius and madness. When I first walked in, he was swathed in burlap, soon trading his robe for a pope hat and jean cut offs. Before removing the hat, he bowed his head and moved the flaps up and down, speaking in a high-pitched voice and offering his services as a cartoon voice actor to any talent scouts in the crowd. He was beyond charismatic, prowling the stage as often as he did the audience and daring us to look away for even a moment.

At one point, Tim Harrington coasted the crowd stuffed into a red crate, later jumping up into the rafters before walking his way back on shoulders and eager, outstretched hands. Onstage, he used the microphone and its cord for all kinds of things: putting the mic in his mouth and spinning the cord around himself while clapping over his head, threading the mic through the legs of his cutoffs, and of course offering the mic to anyone who would take it. He made Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop seem like reasonable, down-to-earth individuals. His voice was just as erratic as his behavior, ranging anywhere from a whisper to a warble and Ozzy Osbourne-esque scream or whatever the music demanded from him. He even tightened a belt around his chest as he bellowed. It was almost impossible to understand the majority of the lyrics, and I was torn between wanting him to stand still for a minute so I could understand him and wanting to know what he’d do next. Between songs, he made offhand comments that almost always elicited a mix of shocked and genuine laughter. On separate occasions, he even ate his own body hair and armpit sweat.

The music itself was awesome, and the band was very tight. At times I was vaguely reminded of Modest Mouse and Talking Heads, blurring the lines between post wave dance music and hardcore art rock. Though I’m still not sure if that made Tim’s performance as frontman somehow more credible or even more bizarre. For the encore, he came out wearing a horse head mask and large multicolored blanket. He shed the mask to reveal his face covered in silver glitter, then picking up a small tupperware container filled with dry ice. He breathed it in and blew it around his face before spilling it into the crowd with an overly loud “Oops”.  For the very last line of the song, he tossed his microphone over the crowd and quickly reeled it back in, tossing it into the air and catching it to deliver the last few words in perfect time with the band. It was the strangest performance I’ve ever seen, and I really don’t know where on the spectrum of madness or genius Les Savy Fav falls on. But I do have an acute desire to hear their music, and the fact that the majority of audience members left with the same dazed and awed expressions as I did meant they probably felt the same way. Their latest release Root for Ruin is now available on iTunes, and they’ll be heading to Australia before heading to the UK in late February. For a complete list of their tour dates, please visit their Myspace page here.