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