Music Millennium

Reviews:

"""We got old, but we got good and we did all we said we would,"" snorts Les Savy Fav's Tim Harrington at the end of ""Meet Me in the Dollar Bin."" That self-reflexive back-patting marks a total sea change from his sheepish admission on the group's furtive 1996 debut ""Blackouts"" that ""this band sort of sucks."" Inches is the culmination of an eight-year project which reportedly began with the group members scrawling cover art on a cocktail napkin and dividing it up into nine easy pieces. And damned if this damaged art-school quintet didn't make good on Harrington's boast; this ambitious retrospective takes 18 songs recorded for nine different labels and lays 'em all out in reverse chronological order so the most mind-blowing stuff hits you first.

Les Savy Fav has a reputation as a gonzo live act that couldn't quite put it all together in the studio, but more recent efforts (recorded with the help of Trans Am's Phil Manley and Up Records house engineer Phil Ek) suggest a change in fortune in the years following the group's uneasy 2001 full-length Go Forth. ""Hold on to Your Genre"" and ""Fading Vibes""-loose homages to Bauhaus and the British Invasion, respectively-sound huge, and nothing like the group that spent its early years breaking down Fugazi records and scrambling to reassemble the components. Initial pressings of the collection come with a DVD featuring audio tributes from David Cross and others, slick homemade videos, and concert footage of Harrington with sweat cascading down his chest and odd patches of hair sprouting everywhere but on his glistening scalp-all offering irrefutable proof of the group's alien sex appeal.

"