Music
by Saby Reyes-Kulkarni
Playing Wednesday, 6th at Exit/In
“I mean, it’s Mormons,” he continues coyly, perhaps letting on. “So, you don’t know—when they offer to organize her receipts, maybe they are just asking to organize her receipts. Or maybe....”
Further confusing the vibe of the song—“Oh Sweet Woods” from the 2006 album Bitter Tea—the band blatantly cops the universally recognized hook and thump of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” only to then stir it together with incongruously lilting acoustic guitar, frosty keyboards, squalling guitar feedback and backwards voices. Taken as a whole, the varying degrees of irony bob side by side in a disorienting swirl.
Of course, fans of this brother-sister duo already recognize this elliptical approach as the band’s trademark, and it’s what makes the music crackle with freshness and edge. Most of the lyrical content, of which Matthew pens the lion’s share, skids toward the listener at oblique angles, with images materializing momentarily only to get washed away in the stream of Eleanor’s rapid-fire monotone. Even when her delivery seems more direct, in lines such as “I married a man / He beat me, he banged me / He swore he would hang me” or “My baby’s angry / He’s always so angry / He smiles only when he can give me abuse,” you can almost taste the sneering beneath Eleanor’s neutrality. Despite Matthew’s insistence of humor at work, a chilling undercurrent of bruised sexuality lurks in her voice, and the pictures she paints darken at the margins very effectively because they lack specific details.
Perhaps it’s indicative of his artistic intentions, then, when Matthew cackles loudly at the suggestion that by writing lyrics for his sister, he might be touching on feminine aspects of himself. Perhaps that’s just way off base.
“I always write with her in mind, but it’s not from her point of view,” he says. “Each song is a different song, and whatever character she’s in is different. When you write about some guy, or when you write a love song—a sincere love song—you’re touching on masculine elements of yourself. In other words, you’re writing from the same stereotypes that you get anything from: greeting-card language, a Paul McCartney song, or what you heard someone say on a TV show that you like. It’s not actually coming from your own experience.”
Matthew continues on a rather academic (though thoroughly engaging and funny) tangent that touches on the esoteric nuances of rock music. But despite the fact that the Fiery Furnaces change their framework every album—from Kraftwerk-like blips and beeps to an album of traditionals done with their grandmother to the intentionally retro ’70s aura of latest album Widow City—he eschews the term “concept album” (citing Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me as the “original concept record”), and adamantly stresses that the Fiery Furnaces don’t play art-rock. “It’s just rock music,” he says.
This may come off as a little obtuse given the experimentalism of their records, but if you catch the latest incarnation of the band in concert, you’ll see he’s quite serious. For all their conceptual tinkering and constant reworking of their sound, the Fiery Furnaces are currently regaling audiences with a stomping, swaggering rock show. Between Matthew’s thick organ lines, Sebadoh bassist Jason Lowenstein’s fuzzed-out four-string attack and drummer Bob D’Amico’s assertive prog chops, the Furnaces definitely aren’t fucking around like a bunch of precious art rockers. Unveiling new band configurations and arrangements of old songs every time the band hits the road, the present lineup reworks the thin, synthy quirk of the song “Blueberry Boat,” for example, as a muscular down-tempo dirge that lumbers tauntingly at you before unleashing its power.
Meanwhile, as if channeling Patti Smith, Eleanor shimmies in place on the bow, spits out brain-scattering sing-speak phrases, and manages to look suitably gentle and threatening at the same time. It’s supposed to be fun—and it certainly is.
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