Fiery Furnaces - The blues as a game

Perhaps falling into today's trend of the promiscuous duo (Dresden Dolls, Kills, White Stripes, Mates Of State etc.) as the epitome of the blues-rock band in its purest essence – more and better than the power trio à la Cream – the Fiery Furnaces nonetheless approach it with a very precise intent and message. This is, perhaps, the third significant stage in the rediscovery of Stones-style blues-rock at the hands of a male-female duo. While Royal Trux grab the blues bodily and march it to the gallows of the most anarchic and gruesome upheaval, and the White Stripes, after them, revisit both its entertainment value (a later wave of Anglo-Saxon next big things can claim no small debt to this) and the anthemic laments of late electrified blues, the Fiery Furnaces ferry it towards joyous, unbridled, visceral and openly creative invention.

Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger were born and raised in Oak Park – an affluent, leafy suburb of Chicago – the same town that gave us Ernest Hemingway, as well as the creative base for numerous Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. Once they reached late adolescence, their paths diverged: Eleanor went on to study at the University of Texas, while Matthew moved to Germany. Not long after, Eleanor too began travelling around Europe, following her mother's work postings (she spent a stretch living in London, besides various trips to southern France, Italy and Greece). Once back home (Matthew tried – unsuccessfully – to enroll at the University of Illinois), the two siblings "brought it all back home" through the musical passions they'd picked up abroad. The decisive turning point that transformed these early stirrings into a genuine (if still amateur) pursuit came with their move to Brooklyn in early 2000. There, together with some friends, they experimented with their first jam sessions steeped in anarchic blues leaning heavily on the Beefheart–Royal Trux axis, not forgetting the developments owed to the European, and British in particular, taste they'd absorbed during their teenage wanderings (above all the garage instinct and the imaginative rock works of the sacred triad Who–Kinks-Pretty Things). Depending on the various incarnations of the line-up (ranging from two to five members), different versions of the Fiery Furnaces emerged over time.

The band was officially christened, however, at their first live show, held at New York's "Enid's" in November 2000 – though the line-up was far from stable. This variability in formation remained constant throughout their first official tour, shifting according to whichever bands the Fiery Furnaces were opening for (among others Spoon, Sleater-Kinney, French Kicks). New York would remain both their current home and the adoptive city of their musical project. By the end of 2002 the Fiery Furnaces decided once and for all that the band's core would consist of themselves alone, Eleanor (guitars and vocals) and Matthew (keyboards and vocals) Friedberger, plus a "mutant" section devoted to studio polish and live-show support, drawing on a fair number of up-and-coming musicians from New York's underground scene. With a decent run of live sets behind them and a growing chemistry, the band turned to early home recordings in the form of limited-run, semi-professional demos. One of these copies landed in the hands of Rough Trade Records' management, who had already caught some of their live sets, and in 2002 decided to sign them to produce a single and a debut album.

In September 2003 the Fiery Furnaces delivered their first recording for the renowned British label, namely the CD single "Crystal Clear", with "Cousin Chris" and "Smelling Cigarettes" as b-sides. The lead track already showcases the defining traits of their musical imagination: a comedy-vaudeville piece that opens dark and rumbling – its clipped phrasing throwing the subsequent instrumental openings into sharp relief (the piano and keyboard doodles and trills, and the blues-garage dash of the bridge) – and it also boasts a memorable vocal performance from Eleanor, fearless and intense.

Soon after, the track was released on a mini-CD (a 7" that also featured "Duffer St. George"), but the real breakthrough came with the release of Gallowsbird's Bark (Rough Trade, October 2003), their debut LP. It's a record that expands in every possible and imaginable direction (or at least every direction allowed to them, within the limits of an experimentation not yet fully focused) the delights first heard on "Crystal Clear", a song that had already attained the status of the band's first classic. "Tropical Ice-land", another standout, is a dreamlike folk-rock number paraded forward by a piercing acoustic guitar, a chorus with boundless range, and the tireless counterpoint of electric guitar (also responsible for the intro and the abrupt shift into a minor key). "Worry Worry" showcases an intense, repetitive chant from Eleanor, while the backing track sounds like the Magic Band jamming with an early-period Lou Reed, toying with the lead guitar. "Two Fat Feet" stands as an emblematic rebuttal of the "Cats & Dogs"-era Royal Trux (with a riff that initially even recalls the Wire of "Pink Flag"), achieved through the sing-along chorus, the effects-drenched guitar decorations, and the sharp, bittersweet pounding of the keyboards. Similarly, "Asthma Attack" sports a murderous boogie-rock riff that sharpens and finally kicks into a Chuck Berry-style chorus-refrain, paired with tireless drumming, while "Up In The North" has a shuffling melodicism framed by synthetic sprites and fresh piano trills, a guitar that's both jarring and harmonic, and a Beefheart still peeking out from the stumbling, stripped-down drums. "I'm Gonna Run" is a Muddy Waters-style blues with improper guitar overdubs and instrumental build-ups anticipated and driven by Eleanor's vibrant voice. "Leaky Tunnel", which follows it without a break (creating another striking effect), offers a techno intro of looped synths, a Velvet-esque guitar in the background (which takes over halfway through the track), Eleanor's usual seductive vocals, a chaotic final build-up, and its release.

Alongside their first live dates and first singles, this is their earliest and most direct expression of a sour, dissonant yet gutsy blues-rock. The contrasts all play out across drawn-out passages, as the blazing hammering of their anthem "South Is Only A Home" and "Gale Blow" recall, or the comic hook of "Bow Wow", capable of scattering any sense of predictability, alongside the terse, incisive brevity of their variations, their games of form and structure. Refrains, choruses and vocal parts rise skyward as if after hours of underground labour, like elusive flywheels. The unprecedented instrumental foundations, which the production — an emulsion of high and low fidelity — captures on the sly, are a superb bedrock of support.

Still in October 2003, the duo took part in the compilation put together by Sanctuary to celebrate Rough Trade's twenty-fifth anniversary ("Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before"), in which more or less recent bands (Royal City, Belle & Sebastian, Detroit Cobras, Hidden Cameras etc.) performed covers of historic bands (Galaxie 500, Young Marble Giants, Feelies) and less historic ones (Strokes). The Fiery Furnaces were tasked with reworking the Fall's "Winter", and the result is excellent. December 2003 saw their contribution to the first volume of the Clash tribute album put together by Uncut Magazine ("Uncut 2003/12 – White Riot Voll. 1-2: A Tribute To The Clash"), featuring their own version of "One More Time".

With 2004 barely underway, the band proved that the creative exuberance of their debut album was far from spent, announcing the follow-up to the exploit of just a few months earlier before critics and audiences had even fully digested it. In the meantime, Eleanor and Matthew reworked "Tropical Ice-land", transforming it with frantic, flashy, clownish arrangements and stuffing it full of synth effects and Bill Haley-gone-circus-performer distortions. "Single Again", on the other hand, was the new track of the period, another emblem of their brief but constant creative mutation, increasingly geared towards composite riffs and marked by juxtapositions between light zones (fanciful scales and runs, keyboard trills) and dark ones (crude, simple guitar sorties), collages of verse and chorus, free counterpoints and thematic reworkings. This capacity for chromatic variation, achieved above all through the distillation of subtle timbres, is really what sets these two hit singles apart ("Tropical Ice-land"/"Single Again", Rough Trade, February 2004; both again released as CD-single and 7"). "We Got Back The Plague" (also already featured on Gallowsbird's Bark), "Evergreen", "Sweet Spots" and "Sing For Me" are the b-sides.

In the second half of 2004 the Fiery Furnaces set out on tour with Franz Ferdinand, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists and the Shins, previewing several songs from the newly announced album along the way. Blueberry Boat (Rough Trade, 2004) thus emerges as an ambitious rock work shot through with concept-album registers, folding in all the influences the band had developed in this short span of time. It's not really a change of direction, nor even (or not only) a major evolution of their own path, but rather a deepening and sharpening of the melodic and harmonic weave of their fantasy-rock. Where with Gallowsbird's Bark they had tried – successfully – to fuse the oddball, chaotic blues of Captain Beefheart's "Shiny Beast" with the vital, visceral blues of the Rolling Stones' "Let It Bleed", by way of Patti Smith's intellectual grit on "Radio Ethiopia" and the psychedelic crescendos of Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers", with Blueberry Boat the Fiery Furnaces expand their structures while simultaneously running them through the sieve of progressive rock.

The five mini-suites on the album, interspersed among shorter, more concise tracks, are the first and clearest demonstration of the duo's unpredictable creative course. The opening "Quay Cur", the most complex of the bunch, is admirable for its multiform blend of garage, overexcited surf-rock, cybernetic beats and industrial noise in its long incipit, sudden shifts in dynamics, and the vocal melodies shaped by Eleanor. Piano reigns over everything, and in the finale it's tasked with leading a choral, conclusive resolution. The following "Straight Street" offers a skewed, disjointed acid-garage, later transfigured by a drumming piano and a guitar à la Velvet Underground, before settling into a dialogue of verses and refrains from Eleanor's quivering throat, with interludes of circus-like mini-orchestras and fanciful variations. "Chris Michaels", on the other hand, kicks off with a deft call-and-response rock'n'roll sprint (with a great, powerful drum part), amid surges in the vocal line and slides of roaring guitars, before giving way to psychedelic distortions and finally closing with a kind of Lennon-esque power-ballad. Further on come "Mason City" (a piano-driven piece with fresh echoes of Jefferson Airplane) and "Chief Inspector Blancheflower" (an electro collage that in its midst flaunts another magnificent piano ballad and deep vocal evolutions from Eleanor).

But the shorter pieces, the ones most closely tied to the previous record, are no less impressive. Take the techno-folk of "Spaniolated", with its dissonant gait, between graceless organ runs and guitars that almost recall the psychedelic irreverence of the Godz, or the brash gospel tip-tap of "My Dog Was Lost". "Turning Round" and "1917" are two chorales built on unison organ, keyboards and voice, steeped in a pregnant baroque atmosphere, while the closer ("Wolf Notes") is entrusted to a new dissonant tour de force — as if the most lighthearted Pere Ubu had taken up techno-pop.

Blueberry Boat is perhaps a frenzied "Twin Infinitives" for the indie-pop era. Attentive to progressive chain-reactions, almost Canterbury-esque in their sparkling visionary quality, governed by a direction that uses piano and keyboards to heighten the tones, drive the momentum, hold up the scaffolding, and distort things into caricature, it's an unpredictable, fleeting treatise of sub-genres mixed together and immediately re-exposed with instrumental richness and inventive relish, often startling in its eruptions of fantastical, melodic, honeyed, ironic bursts. It overflows with marvelous fun and profound tenderness. The Friedberger siblings, co-authors of the music and lyrics, are supported — including in live performances — by their friends Toshi Yano (bass and synth) and Andy Knowles (drums), both up-and-coming musicians.

The release date of Blueberry Boat (July 12) also coincided with the Fiery Furnaces' appearance on Rough Trade's roundup compilation of new talent ("The Rough Trade Field Guide To Music Vol.1"), alongside Art Brut, Aberfeldy, Hal, Eastern Lane and others, featuring the standout tracks from the two singles released between the two LPs ("Tropical Ice-land" and "Single Again").

2005 opens with yet another contribution. This time it's "Sunday Nights: The Songs Of Junior Kimbrough", a tribute album to the great Delta blues guitarist released in January on Fat Possum; here Eleanor and Matthew rework "I'm Leaving".

In February, Ep (Rough Trade, 2005) is released, an album collecting singles, b-sides and unreleased tracks the band had produced up to that point. This new release is striking for a few good reasons: first, for their innate gift for crafting songs that are wildly infectious in their dazed avant-pop, even on minor compositional occasions (b-sides, compilation tracks). Take "Evergreen", a piano-and-effects ballad carried almost entirely by the melody traced by Eleanor's voice, yet also featuring chord changes worthy of the best late-60s British rock, and an effective closing bluesy acoustic guitar passage, or "Duffer St. George", a clownish garage-punk number enriched by tinkling piano, a hard tempo change in the chorus, and a dreamy keyboard bridge that overwhelms everything. "Sweet Spots" is a sort of techno-prog-synth gallop somewhere between Devo and the Go-Go's, and "Cousin Chris" is a vaudeville march with a skipping piano, off-beat chorus, a schizophrenic refrain of deranged keyboards, and a non-sense interlude à la Gong.

Secondly, the Fiery Furnaces prove capable of crafting an album of songs in a manner that's entirely unintentional, yet also (and above all) self-sufficient. The sequencing, the relationships between one track and the next recall the best moments of Blueberry Boat, but the brevity of the individual tracks is that of Gallowsbird's Bark; over everything reigns an enchanted, playful atmosphere that, paradoxically, ties it all together. The two unreleased tracks that crown the collection act, in this sense, as effective glue holding together inventions already well established, a springboard for reshuffling ideas and steering them toward their immediate future, and a definitive trial by fire for the treacherous short format. "Here Comes The Summer", the first of the two, is a pop song bordering on perfection: a catchy melody right from the intro, a madrigal-like synth refrain, a deliciously sweet chorus and vintage keyboards given solemn prominence. "Sullivan's Social Club", the album's closer, showcases Matthew's great work on keyboards (percussive-harmonic), with Eleanor's childlike nursery-rhyme timbres, before she launches, in the second half, into a festive chorus with a music-box melody over a Neu! beat.

A collection of ideas, even more than of material unjustly relegated to the most stifling of back seats, Ep is a delectable record that manages to do justice to a pop compromise of two very different, and not entirely aligned, scales: the huge, gigantic one of the tons of ideas packed inside a single track, and the tiny one of the outward format of the seemingly innocuous radio song, quietly reaffirmed time and again. What remains a mystery is the arcane alchemy behind such an enjoyably smooth and fun result, despite its markedly intricate sonic structure.

Starting in the second half of the year — so once again not long after their last release — the band announces that 2005 will see not one but two full-length releases, and that the first of the two will feature the active participation, as a performer, of their grandmother, Olga Sarantos.

This first LP of 2005, and their third official album, comes out on October 25 under the title Rehearsing My Choir (Rough Trade, 2005). The record appears almost entirely devoid of pop sweetness or flashy divertissements (they're present only to a minimal degree), built instead around a long, intricate autobiographical narration delivered by the grandmother, backed by Eleanor's usual vibrant vocal performances and by loosely improvised arrangements, indifferent to divisions into chapters (whether songs or suites), to any kind of structured development, or to conventional time signatures. At a deeper level, this work stages an instinctive intergenerational encounter: on one side, the grandmother's stories and anecdotes (the true center of the scene), on the other, the glosses of her granddaughter Eleanor, at once hopeful and amused.

The album opens with the shower of festive keyboards on "Garfield El", over which Olga's narration and Eleanor's singing settle in with a nonchalance never so Beefheart-like. A new idea introduces the melancholy harpsichord of "The Wayfaring Granddaughter", out of which ideas and variations emerge, leading to a dialogue between the two protagonists. The opening of "Seven Silver Curses" could be a fragment of Genesis's "Supper's Ready", but a bluesy guitar à la Robert Johnson contradicts all of that, dusting off a theme encountered earlier (a polyphony drawn from "We Wrote Letters Every Day"), an almost beach-punk bass, and a chorus of distorted guitars.

If Olga's narration (made up of situations and characters thrown together at random) and Eleanor's counterpoints sometimes cause the otherwise brilliant musical ideas to get lost, "Though Let's Be Fair" takes charge of injecting fresh energy into the album's closing stretch, laying out no fewer than four melodic ideas in succession. "Slavin' Away", the only thing resembling an actual song on the whole record, has a verse that, before reaching the chorus, passes through suspended organs and brooding piano marches à la Nick Cave. The title track revisits a funeral march already heard in "Garfield El", amid dark harpsichord minimalism, and the closing "Does It Remind You Of When?" varies some thematic cells from "Though Let's Be Fair", leading to a fresh shower of repeated keyboard figures that closes the record in a manner mirroring its opening.

It's the Fiery Furnaces themselves, first and foremost, who found an alternative status through this album. Beyond the various stylistic puzzles, the usual looseness of overflowing ideas, and the many déjà vu moments and leitmotifs, this is above all their most autonomous and free work. The real tour de force, in any case, belongs to brother Matthew, who plays just about everything, and who also edited and post-produced this mountain of composite fragments, like a little genius worthy of the most mischievous Oldfield.

October 25, 2005 also sees the release (by a coincidence of dates shared with Blueberry Boat, see above) of the tribute album to the Beatles' "Rubber Soul", marking 40 years since its official release, titled "This Bird Has Flown – A 40th Anniversary Tribute To The Beatles' Rubber Soul" (Razor & Tie, 2005). The Fiery Furnaces, alongside Low ("Nowhere Man"), Ted Leo & The Pharmacists ("I'm Looking Through You"), Sufjan Stevens ("What Goes On") and Cowboy Junkies ("Run For Your Life"), reinterpret "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)", the very track whose subtitle gives the album its name (and one of the most prestigious songs from the Lennon/McCartney partnership).

The artistic vision of the two jack-of-all-trades Chicago siblings can (so far) be summed up as cumulative, meaning built through successive stylistic additions, through progressive layers of ideas. What emerges, at first general glance, is a pronounced sensitivity in the imaginative arrangements, always ready to deconstruct the basic creative line, to build crosswise, unclassifiable structures, and to embrace eclecticism and eccentricity in the pairing of lyrics and music, composition and performance. Just as Pere Ubu contaminated the most aggressive garage-rock with noxious foams of industrial electronics, often detonating its load-bearing features in the process, so the Fiery Furnaces contaminate pop with imaginative assaults — mostly harmonic in nature, but rhythmic and melodic too — on its vital joints, on its most intimate and profound dynamics.

The first means by which this programme of creative vivisection is carried out (truculent only in the most fanciful sense of the word) is the instrumental one. Through Eleanor's voice, which crosses the slyest Patti Smith with the brash early Chrissie Hynde and even the vibrant Grace Slick of her golden years, these eccentric conjugations find a first legitimising ground, a constant Beefheart-ian interpretive anchor that steers clear of the usual stereotypes and engages with the orchestration in a thoroughly anti-canonical way. Her guitar, via a distortion somewhere between Sonics-style garage-rock and the unhinged recklessness of the demonic early-masterpiece Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, is a further vehicle of emotional and vital charge in the broadest sense, of harmonic instability and disturbing deformation of the thematic material on show. Her strumming is languid yet fierce, like powerful noise-avant-garde sabre strokes à la Joe Baiza inflicted on frail pop structures.

But the bulk of the duo's sound, as already noted several times, comes from Matthew's work on keyboards, an instrumental element that here plays even more freely on opposing registers of construction (harmonic scaffolding, decorative scales, load-bearing chords) and deconstruction (fearless dissonances, demented little motifs of open contrast, acid variations on timbre and sound), alternated with a mastery worthy of Eric Drew Feldman and absolute compositional freedom.

But the "zero" level of their primary aesthetic, that is, the deepest starting point for understanding the music of the Fiery Furnaces, beyond their individual instrumental skills (which alone would already be enough to forge several of their distinctive traits), is actually the blues. Their early inspirations are manifold: Captain Beefheart (the "Shiny Beast" period) and Royal Trux ("Cats And Dogs") for the brevity of their imaginative and highly oblique blues, and for their ability to vary a shared body of material (instrumental, compositional, harmonic), and the Rolling Stones for the rough immediacy of their melodic lines, their uninhibited and fearless interpretive boldness. These three poles of blues-rock reinvention gave the duo, more than anything else, a kind of parlour-game approach to the genre, a poetic foundation not without impish licence, yet still faithful and responsive to its most important dictates. From the Rolling Stones they take the driving, rock-solid quality; from Beefheart, the Dadaism, the use of and sensitivity to atypical collage. Through these two interpretive keys, the Fiery Furnaces summon and unearth a dark world of eccentric creation ranging from Lucia Pamela to the Shaggs, from Bruce Haack to Lee Hazlewood to Os Mutantes.

Through this game of blues invention, their work becomes a link between the alt-pop culture of recent years and the cabaret-hall style of the Residents (distilled above all in the "Commercial Album"), but also with a culture of reclaiming pop-artistic and musical consumer material that reaches back to Zappa and the Holy Modal Rounders, and before that to the stand-up comedy of Shelley Barman and the extraordinary lesson of Kurt Weill. The inextricable combination of creative unpredictability and the reuse of pop culture, of futurism and a rearguard tendency toward rediscovering the submerged, indefinable world of the late 60s, is the true foundation of the band's sound: a bluesy expressionist comedy, equipped with vaudeville insertions, breaks and interludes, harmonic absurdities, melodic amusements of every kind. From a particular point of view, theirs is also an esoteric form of non-psychedelia, carried out in a progressive way that lays out all the genres related to it, their variations, and the reconstruction of a "pre" and "post" sound, almost as if constituting their own highly personal and deviant, misleading tribute. From actual psychedelia (Jefferson Airplane above all) they take, if anything, the modus operandi (crescendos, harmonic crumbling, skewed and contaminated melodies), without ever truly embracing its most typical content. Their noise-making practice is always functional, always able to display with great nonchalance the tragicomic, horror-tinged and subliminal undertones of their fun, while at the same time making clear that this fun is in fact far more serious and weighty than it might appear at first glance.

The Fiery Furnaces' pièces can be traced back to a kind of ritual game of childlike invention, complete with lullabies, extended chants, sing-alongs and rhythm'n'blues anthems, parish-hall-animator-style calls, aware of an unrestrained joy and a solid aesthetic of the most genuine burlesque. The instrumental contributions of Eleanor and Matthew, as mentioned at the start, return here in the dual function of laying the groundwork for a compositional complexity that once again links them to Zappa the bandleader of the Mothers Of Invention. The powerful intellectual grit of Eleanor's deep vocal delivery (Patti Smith/Pretenders) thus combines ineluctably with Matthew's timbral and sonic exuberance, following a programme of clipped technology aimed at scrambling its own means of expression. Their disparate conjugations presuppose a programme of musical vivisection that sometimes also meets its opposite, as in the case of the progressive/Canterbury-style borrowings found on Blueberry Boat, with its tendency toward conceptual unity, toward the British rock opera in the manner of the Who and the Pretty Things, albeit without running any apocalyptic risks, offering instead a virtually endless melting pot of invention. At that point, as in the commedia dell'arte, a higher-order deus ex machina intervenes to interrupt the flow, while also reminding us that inventive freedom can and must be total.

If Gallowsbird's Bark imports its trappings, the raw materials drawn from the most earthy blues, Blueberry Boat best combines it all together, and Rehearsing My Choir, perhaps from this point of view their most complete and radical experiment, forgoes easy listenability in order to reach a rock-solid expressive goal that had been missing from the alt-rock scene for years. It stands as both their recap and, at the same time, their first solid construction, built around a performance — that of the grandmother — which places at its centre the first and most important custodian of childhood's offshoots, a casket holding a parallel and alien universe in its purest, most uncontaminated sense.

The Fiery Furnaces' operating context is, first and foremost, one of staunch opposition to the easy formulas of the next big thing or the introverted musings of the loser singer-songwriters of the 90s. The Friedberger siblings instead present themselves as builders of talkative, joyous, open and sunny pièces, stirring it all together with refined, distinguished research (witness, in this respect, the sprawling lyrics of Blueberry Boat and the free-form readings of Rehearsing My Choir). In the final analysis, the Fiery Furnaces embody one of the most truthful and moving art-life pairings ever heard in music, or at least within popular music.

The second of the two albums announced in the second half of 2005 (initially planned for late 2005, shortly after Rehearsing My Choir, then pushed to early the following year, and finally moved to 11 April 2006), is titled Bitter Tea (Fat Possum/Rough Trade, 2006), and is first and foremost a skilful concentrate of the main components of the Fiery Furnaces sound appreciated so far (melody, imaginative chains of ideas, anti-narrative structures), yet one that still manages to go further.

From the very opening track ("In My Little Thatched Hut"), infectious in its simplicity, the duo delights in building electro-psych contours around Eleanor's sly voice, or in plunging the acoustic guitar into a black hole of dissonance and tribal percussion. Tracks like "I'm In No Mood" and "Black-Hearted Boy" are first naturally linked by a sort of acoustic illusion, but are also beset by swarms of digital dissonance that overwhelm the intense timbres of the melodies, recurring motifs, and reverse and cut-up sound effects that reveal the dark side of vaudeville.

Other delights include "I'm Waiting To Know You", a doo-wop serenade done their own way, "Oh Sweet Woods" with a disco-funk strut echoing Jackson's "Billie Jean", the short pop-song "Police Sweater Blood Vow", and above all "Nevers", amid hazy synths and robotic space-age pop phrasing, a collage between the humanoid and the monstrous in the two siblings' voices. The album closes with "Whistle Rhapsody", a piece vaguely in the prog-Floyd vein, which shifts key right up to a final, solemn, eardrum-splitting dissonance.

Bitter Tea thus stands, first of all, as a perceptual reworking of a mirror-image aesthetic taste, featuring an ever more multifaceted Eleanor, or as a lengthy fantasy not lacking in sarcastic, dark and brazen humour, which turns into a stubborn tragicomic poem steeped in obliqueness and Mephistophelian tones, playing with effects, linguistic borrowings, nursery rhymes, timbral ferocity, aliens, and feminine sensibility.

If the premise is yet another pop shredding (Bitter Tea), then it's no surprise that Matthew, the duo's rational-creative soul, ventures with the courage of expressive release into a very long-distance solo outing (double CD). Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School (859 Recordings, 2006) is pure Fiery Furnaces-style in its surreal-autobiographical concept and its theme of spiritual journey (between the East and Pentecost). The first disc, aside from the well-aimed melodies of "Her Chinese Typewriter", "Up The River", and "Ruth Vs. Richard", doesn't manage to do much to distinguish itself from what could pass as a collection of outtakes from the main band. The second part, likewise devoted to more or less daring compositions ("A Mystical Preparative To Lewdness", "The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co. Resignation Letter", "I Started Drinking Alcohol At The Age of Eleven"), is a poorly matched batch of experimental junk, let down by sloppy, gaudy, colourless and monotonous arrangements. Here Matthew comes across as an indietronic nerd out on his own, not the cut-and-paste genius of Rehearsing My Choir.

Widow City (Thrill Jockey, 2007) opens up, for the duo, a period of interim accommodation marked by a dip in raw inspiration and scant care for the record as a whole (which ends up feeling more like a multiplicity than a work of art), even as their trademark eccentric overall complexity persists. There are clear electrified mini-jams, flaunting heavy passages (almost a parody of Zappa-style hard rock), unstable melodies and the now-familiar repertoire of slippery variations ("Clear Signal From Cairo", "The Philadelphia Grand Jury"), while the shorter tracks sometimes feel less cohesive, apart from the progressive-punk numbers that mutate into monstrous marches ("Uncle Charlie"), and the vocal interlocking of melody and jester-like insertions ("Restorative Beer"), courtesy of an Eleanor on fine performing form. Tracks like "Ex-Guru" take on fantastical dance movements thanks to a clearly psychedelia-inspired video clip (via YouTube). The performances, more broadly, tend to win out — rising above slack scripting and flattened writing — and work to shore up clumsy digressions and oddball about-faces.

In 2008, the double live album Remember serves as both a testament to the band's live activity and an anthology of their brief but already extremely rich career.

Once that binge was over, the duo returned to the studio with I'm Going Away. Despite the nearly two-year gap since its predecessor, the album is rather disappointing, as if the duo had let down their guard and drifted toward becoming an exclusive Eleanor project.

Tracks like the rock'n'roll of "Take Me Around Again" and "The End Is Near" (their first real ballad) have none of the band's explosive imagination, while several other tracks (along with most of the harmonic ideas and arrangements) sound like self-imitations of their own classics. If the intention was to catalogue melancholy, then the absence of their trademark asides is sorely felt. Otherwise, the record remains an almost irritating, stoner-ish trinket.

Take Me Round Again, available only via download, contains Matthew's divertissements and Eleanor's acoustic reinterpretations of tracks from I'm Going Away.

In 2011 Matthew Friedberger returned to his solo career by launching Solos, a series of eight vinyl-only albums (available by subscription only) in which the author records over backing tracks each dedicated to a single instrument in turn. The first two, Napoleonette (piano and keyboards) and Meet Me In Miramas (guitar), are little more than rambling displays of virtuosity alternating with half-baked pop ditties, something truly far removed from his signature multi-layered mixing with the main band. Old Regimes is dedicated to the harp. A cascade follows: Cut It Out, for drum machine, Death-In-Life, organ, Arrested of Charges on Unemployement, for bass. Artemisia and Goodbye Forever are appendices that finally close out the cycle. All these tedious experiments were later selected and compiled on The Diabolical Principle.

In April 2011 Eleanor too announced the release of her debut solo album (on Merge Records), Last Summer, slated for July.

When it came out, the record sounded like a failed late-period Fiery Furnaces work; the same normalizing tendency is confirmed by the single "My Mistakes" and the tirade "I Won't Fall Apart On You Tonight". Still, Eleanor establishes herself as the more melodically gifted of the two whenever she ventures into the realm of serious singer-songwriting ("Scenes From Bensonhurst", "One-Month Marathon", "Glitter Gold Year") and old-school pop, as on "Roosevelt Island". Pleasant and free of major surprises, it works both as a confirmation of a style and as a quiet variation on a theme.

Matt finally channels the dispensable "studies" of his Solos into an ambitious work, Matricidal Sons of Bitches (2012), a sprawling 45-track collage-marathon of reprocessed sounds, old-fashioned quotations (Tin Pan Alley above all), an endless near-Frank Zappa-esque parade of short or extremely short half-ideas, somewhere between a fragmentary vocabulary and an erudite tour-de-force. Caught between the tedium of his usual melodic ideas and an empty quest for the avant-garde, it suffers above all from the lack of any harmonic thread; aside from a few successful sketches and some creative sampling and looping, the meat of the work is anything but revolutionary. This mammoth pamphlet mainly towers as yet another confirmation of his outsized ego and naive excesses.

Even on her second solo outing, Personal Record (2013), Eleanor reconfirms just how little the two siblings achieve on their own: apart from a few carefree refrains, these are generic, melodically flimsy songs that at times try to ape the main band's "Tropical Iceland" without having its charisma.

The single "False Alphabet City" (2015) is the prelude to her collaboration with visual artist Sara Magenheimer.

The third album, New View (2016), emerges as her most solid attempt at songwriting and band interplay, and the least glibly retro-pop, thanks largely to her nods to the masters: "He Didn't Mention His Mother", one of her best, echoes Cat Stevens' "Wild World", Neil Young-like poses and vaudeville seepage skew "Open Season" off-kilter, while among the longer, more reflective tracks the clear winner is the Southern-tinged "A Long Walk", something of her own "Like A Rolling Stone". On the melodic front, "Sweetest Girl" also recaptures a bit of the Furnaces' zany verve. Eleanor is backed by a tight, sharp band that even gets in a few jam moments, but her own instrumental ability has grown too, as shown by the half-whispered acoustic stomp of "Never Is A Long Time".

Matthew Friedberger brought in drummer Bob D'Amico of Sebadoh (also a former Furnaces collaborator) to launch the moniker Saqqara Mastabas. Their debut Libras (2016) is the exact opposite of the arrogant wordiness of his previous solo works: not only in length (barely half an hour) but above all in the snappy dynamics of its flights of fancy, almost a pure outlet for the musician. Technically, these are duets between his electro-analog keyboards and a drum kit that has never sounded so free and pliable, with no vocals at all. In the opening one-two ("Walking Through The False Door"-"Fixed By The Tiny Valons Of The Vulture Goddess") there's already a small gem of schizophrenia, a touch of electronic classicism recalling Wendy Carlos and Tomita, immediately followed by a raw, unfiltered delirium worthy of a bloodthirsty maniac. More generally, the tracks rarely follow a rational structure, or rather they pretend to build one only to constantly unravel it: the solemn, bagpipe-like recurring motif of "Smoking In The Valley Embalming In The Valley" ends up degenerating progressively after duetting with a kitschy Japanese disco-dance groove. Even jazz intentions surface on "No Escape For The Serfs On The Surf", though loaded with all manner of heresies (a drum machine chief among them), gratuitous tempo changes and a woozy mood that buries harmony in Residents-like fashion. Thanks also to numbers like "Uto On The Upswing" (a chaotic whirl of jungle-remixed carioca dominated by a cocky drum part), the album can stand alongside Zach Hill's improvised symphony, Church Gone Wild. "The Failure" mimics the rhythmic line of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction", covering it in cartoonish motifs full of dissonant, even wild and serialist figures. A tribal pattern runs through the electronic hallucinations of "Unknow Term For Butcher", while its yang, "The Cosmetician's Knife", relies on a synthetic pulse before being pierced by chilling trumpeting blasts. With a touch more ambition, the album could have become a small rock equivalent of Don Cherry's Mu.

Undeterred, Eleanor released Rebound (2018), lo-fi, solo and electronic compared to its predecessor. A run of four songs stands out just barely among the filler: the single "In Between Stars" (a glib disco beat) and "The Letter" (an amateurish ballad), both with a certain Fleetwood Mac-like sinuousness, the soft boogie of "Make Me A Song" and, even better, the bombastic nursery-rhyme of "Everything". An EP would finally have confirmed her as a mature singer-songwriter.

After a string of not exactly successful solo projects, the two Fiery Furnaces finally reunited for the single "Down At The So And So On Somewhere/The Fortune Teller's Revenge" (2020).

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