ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER - Last Summer

With the Fiery Furnaces stalled both in quantity (the one-album-a-year pace has been stuck since 2009) and in quality (their last studio album is the underwhelming “I'm Going Away”), and with the band's cerebral half, Matthew Friedberger, busy with some frivolous self-released “Solos”, Eleanor Friedberger takes the opportunity to find her courage and launch her solo career with “Last Summer”.

To all intents and purposes it sounds like a lost album by the parent band, perfectly channeled into the “normalizing” trend of their most recent output and stripped of her brother's more bombastic experiments. The single “My Mistakes”, a neo-twist, barely adds marimba-like electronic effects, and “I Won't Fall Apart On You Tonight”, the track with the most drive, is a shifting, unstable boogie.

But the singer, now more mature and bringing a vocal presence better suited to the material than in the past, also ventures into the world of serious songwriters, in particular approaching the sweet monotony of Suzanne Vega (“Scenes From Bensonhurst”, “One-Month Marathon”, the most understated track with the humblest arrangement, but also the most instinctive) and the deconstructed novelties of Joanna Newsom or Amanda Palmer, albeit without their vocal excursions (“Glitter Gold Year”, her take on the pop ballad).

Eleanor then engages with classic genres, broadening her vocabulary somewhat, as in “Roosevelt Island” (which quotes ELO's “Last Train To London”), a soft-funk number with verse and chorus stretched out and delivered in her typically wordy style, and in the graceful slow numbers “In Of The Seventh Ray” and “Heaven”.

Whether you want to take it as a slight variation on a theme or as a firm confirmation of a style, the strict significance of Friedberger's first full-length remains the unveiling of the duo's true melodic talent. Quietly varied, firmly anchored to the song form, pleasant without too many surprises. It quotes and reshuffles genres and harks back to the pop of eras past, and Merge, who know a thing or two about this sort of stuff (and won the exclusive rights in a photo finish over Thrill Jockey), couldn't be happier.

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18/07/2011