There comes a point in every man's life, usually when you've sat around chewing the chorus-repetition gristle-fat with a band like Young Coyotes (good first impression, great roots but no growth; set plods) for 20-30 minutes, when you wonder if you've made the right decision. You feel insecure, naked to the world. A few more bad shows and the wife'll have yr balls in a cannery jar. Not only that, but you had to spring for a babysitter and spend gas money to get there.
Bands like The Fiery Furnaces make the effort worthwhile. Boasting top-level troops at each key penetration point, FF use a traditional r'n'r quartet to burrow through the surprisingly rigid boundaries imposed -- whether self- or subconsciously -- by much of the genre. You just don't hear bands twitch, stutter, double back, dip, dive, dodge, duck, deep-dick, stop-start, jump-kick, side-swipe and twitterpate rock the way Fiery Furnaces do; it's just not DONE. This is why they bake my brain like a brick-oven rye.
If you thought their albums were pounding, incredibly intricate epics, you were right, but their live presence is equally confounding, consisting as it does of:
- a drummer giving his absolute FUCK-all to every measure;
- bass playing both nimble, bold and tough as a thimble-thumb;
- Eleanor Friedberger's singing, a bit low in the mix at times but never completely lost; a British sea captain lost his drawl in the rain and E.F. snagged it for her Blueberry Boat;
- Radiohead-bater/lover of ghost-language Matthew Friedberger on guitar: at times negligible, at times best-ever, always the driving force as the rhythm, the lead, and, most of all, the one we ALL KNOW wrote these fantastic songs (all in that so-characteristic overcoat)...
I can way without hesitation I didn't recognize all but one of these songs. Think about it: I've been following this band semi-closely for a half-decade and they put out so much material I can't even parse more than a single song from a set of 14-odd! You gotta love their fluidity. Hell, you gotta love them period. If you want the NOISE brought on you, but with a history-professor edge and some Jimi Hendrix/Ira Kaplan/J Mascis six-string pyrotechnics thrown in for good measure, I can't think of a better recommendation than The Fiery Furnaces.
[Photo: Lithe Sebesta]