The Fiery Furnaces
Issue #33
Widow City (Thrill Jockey)
By Joel Cusumano
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
The Fiery Furnaces have burned through six albums in just four years, each of them stuffed with challenging music that disregards stable tempos in order to shift melodies quicker than you can shout “proggy.” Stubborn contradictions earmark their music: Mini-suites of epic lengths ride out unepic, minimal arrangements; the singer’s sweet voice perpetually swallowed by hissing, skittering drums and fuzzed-out, serpentine guitars.
Given that, the band’s latest, Widow City, is easy digestion for anyone who’s already swallowed Bitter Tea’s airtight compression of ugly beauty. Zooming, screeching synths; gentle, melodic vignettes zapped by jarring tempo shifts; and tinny, toy-drum sounds all stretch out across a Seussian soundscape of Widow City. Some critics might call out the Furnaces’ jagged ‘anti-formula’ as no more than meaningless art-rock bouillabaisse: Add 30 seconds of boogie guitar here, stir it up with some loud garbage-can drumming, cut to old-timey tack piano. They would be on point if the Friedbergers’ speedy and boundless musical accessorizing weren’t such integral parts of a vision vacuum-sealed into the songs. The Furnaces haven’t lost their talent for building gorgeous melodies and countermelodies (and rudely ripping them to shreds). In fact, on Widow City, the interweaving of sounds feels ever more seamless and purposeful.
Anxiety in the grasp of bureaucratic indifference is realized in the scattered melody of “The Philadelphia Grand Jury;” on “Japanese Slippers,” the invasion of a creepy neighbor is recalled by dirty, tiptoe drum-machine beats. Eleanor’s effortless, airy vocals do a great deal to draw listeners into the songs’ non-sequitur narratives; few others could throw off asides like “It’s all that stands in your way / If stands is the right word” without a slip over such an exhaustively busy rhythm section.
I’m disinclined to believe the band’s explanation for Widow’s lyrics — derived, they say, from old magazine ads, the cultural pages from alt-lifestyle magazines, and “depictions of grieving children using the ... Ouija board.” Ditto for the band pointing to King Crimson and Gentle Giant in reference to the album’s musical inspiration. These odd digressions probably say more about the sister-brother duo’s bizarre penchant for the obscure than offer factual clues to the record’s meaning. For all I can tell, “Restorative Beer” is about downing a cold one when you’re bummed, and “Clear Signal From Cairo” is just a frustrated love song (albeit a lyrically loopy one).
There’s no doubt that the Friedbergers’ childlike disobedience of efficient songcraft will continue to place them on the outskirts of the musical community. But the Furnaces are cut of that iconoclastic jib that is so rewarding because they don’t try to offer immediate rewards. For patient music fans, they sink deeper, into a dreamy but somehow more realistic membrane.
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