The Fiery Furnaces: I'm Going Away, part 3

Charting the Oceans

From: Brian
To: Scott & Monty

Oh, Scott Scott Scott...posting a chart like that is like chumming the waters for music-geek sharks. I'm trying, off the top of my head, to think of any 5 or 6 bands I really dig whose careers follow any of those arcs and I'm coming up dry once I get to Television and Liz Phair.

The real problem with applying this kind of charted thinking to bands like the Fiery Furnaces is, I think, that any artist displaying evidence of evolution will inevitably have fans who glom on and/or drop off at each major breakthrough point. Hell, I know people who insist that Dinosaur was useless once they added the "Jr." to their name (which was, what, album #2?). And while I think there's a great case to made for Archers of Loaf being the perfect Dropoff Chart Band, there are days when I'd say that All the Nation's Airports is a better record than Icky Mettle. (Oh, and you got me scouring the Web for more Music Charts, some of which are linked here; and dig this!)

But Scott, you got me riled up with the graph gambit and it's taken my focus from the matter at hand, I'm Going Away. I think I split the experiential difference between the two of you with this band: I saw them open up for Mike Watt a bunch of years back and thought they were cool (I still have the CD-R of demos they were handing out at the gig). Ever since, I've more or less (generally less) kept tabs on the band without ever really taking the plunge. Every time I'd sit myself down with samples from Widow City or Blueberry Boat, I'd never quite get past keeping them on the Maybe list.

I'm not sure that I'm Going Away is doing much to change that. My experience of this record was similar to yours, Monty, in that I kind of sat back with the music and waited for the lyrics/text to start emerging. What happened was that each of the 4 or 5 times I listened, the hook in "Drive to Dallas" and "Charmaine Champagne" jumped out at me...and that was it (maybe my alliteration affinity got the best of me?). The music, as has always happened with this band, reminded me in spots of Pere Ubu (good), Frank Zappa (very good) and Steely Dan (very bad), all with a singer who sounded a bit sweeter and a lot more bored; if Eleanor could hook up with Stephin Merritt for a project, it could be the ennui suite of all time.

All of which is to say...this is an album whose complexity and craft made it easy to pay attention to, but I never felt like I was hearing it any better from spin to spin. Scott, can you say in a little more detail what's powering this record for you? And if you could present the answer in a GraphJam, that would be ideal.

Plotting along the axis,
Brian

The Fiery Furnaces: I'm Going Away, part 2

From: Monty

To: Scott and Brian

Wow. Interesting how vastly different people’s perceptions and perspetives can be. I only wish I had heard Chrissie Hynde, or something resembling a hook.

Although I have been hearing bits and pieces of The Fiery Furnaces since (I believe) their inception, I'm pretty sure this is the first time I’ve subjected myself to a full album. And probably the last time. I was hoping to hear something that would help me understand their apparent popularity, but alas, no.

From what I’ve heard and what little I’ve read about them, it seems clear that their fans celebrate them as adventuresome, eclectic, and/or experimental. To me, it just sounds like people messing around. There were two or three places on the record where I heard an instrumental passage that sounded like it might go somewhere, maybe lead into an almost retro jazz kind of flourish, but nothing ever materialized. There are definitely some interesting sonic ideas, but for me they don’t add up to anything.

On the other hand, the music is enormously preferable to the vocals. As I’ve said to Brian before, when I’m listening to a new recording for the first time I like to try to ignore the lyrics as much as I can. I want to hear the vocals as another melodic element without letting the “text,” if you will, get in the way. I couldn’t do it here, as the vocals are so front-and-center. I could live with that if the words were interesting or if Friedberger’s voice were at all appealing. But the lyrics are, to paraphrase Capote, typing, not writing, and her voice sounds like a cross between MTV-era Michael Jackson (not good) and Antony from The Johnsons (even worse).

Though it’s not at all unusual for me to hear music that I don’t care for, it is a very rare thing for me to hear something and be unable to understand why someone else might like it. But sometimes it happens.

The Fiery Furnaces- I'm Going Away

From: Scott
To: Monty and Brian

A mid-to-late career effort by a brother/sister duo that has been around since aught two. This recording, their seventh lp dispenses with both the preciousness of their Grandma-centric Rehearsing My Choir and their frustrating, choppy art/prog rock elements and the unnecessary jarring style changes therein. Singer Eleanor Friedbergerhas developed a Chrissie Hynde-like thrust to her delivery that propels the songs through the gentler moments as well as the more energetic. The songs have quality hooks, which was always present on earlier releases, seemingly to the band's dismay, for all the work they did to bury them.
So here we are at the seventh album, and despite all prevailing wisdom, I am finally fully on board.

 As this chart demonstrates, the earlier stuff is always better, purer, closer to the source. How lame is it to hop in in the middle, after the edges have been worn away by time. I don't think the 20 year old me preferred the later work of any band. The concept of getting better with age was abhorrent and unnatural; it went against nature. I knew bands wore out their welcome by the fourth album. Some bands might have a juvenile first effort then pull it together by the for the sophomore release, but these bands flamed out after the third as reliably as the rest. A few shooting stars might light up the world with one great release and then collapse into  a black hole. Following any band's career after the roaring third was sheer indulgence.

At 40+ years I find myself more and more dismissing the early rumblings and joining in when the fruit is ripe on the musical career, wallowing in the mellow tones and sanded edges of a band polished to a deep mahogany finish.

-Scott
The Fiery Furnaces- Drive To Dallas

Lou Barlow: Goodnight Unknown, part 7

One More Thing...

To: Scott & Monty
From: Brian

Oh, look at me going all out of order/off topic here. I know we are, technically, still in the midst of the Stephane Wrembel convo, but I found myself having one more thought about the Lou Barlow debate.

Specifically, I wanted to answer Scott's post in which he said, "The era of album artwork, liner notes and production credits was merely a blip in the history of recorded music." Last week, I started reading How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, which starts off waaaaaaay before rock & roll (and a little before recorded music, in fact) as a way of examining the history of American popular music from an angle other than, "The Beatles are Year Zero of 20th-century pop music, and that is good."

The thing that made me think about Scott's post was that there is, arguably, not a single minute in the history of contemporary popular music (ie, anything the springs from the African and/or African-American root) that does not have a string visual component for the listener to latch onto. Sure, there may not have been enlightening liner essays from Leonard Feather accompanying early Scott Joplin sheet music, but there certainly were images on the cover, visions of what sort of dances would be done to the music, and once we get into minstrelsy...well, there sure as hell was some deeply coded visual information to go along with that.

In fact, I think one could argue that the rise of mass-produced recordings actually decreased the visual component of the listening experience. I'm specifically thinking that early music (and here we can really go back as far as we like, historically) was almost never listened to alone. It would be played live, either in a public space like a concert hall or a private living room, and there would be a good chance that there would be dancing to go along with it. The listener would always see the musician(s) (in a less-mediated way than MTV would later provide), and race, class, clothing, and so on would inform the music. (I'd also add that if you go to any older opera house or concert hall, the visual gingerbread packing every inch of available wall, ceiling and floor space makes most LP cover art look limited.)

So basically, I'm positing that we might actually be in a non-visual "blip" moment right now. Listeners have rarely listened with their eyes closed, and I bet there's another path to rejoining the eye & ear around the next bend.

See my vest,
Brian