Fiery Furnaces

Two kids, Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger, brother and sister, from the suburbs of Chicago. Early 2000s. They listen to old blues glories, but they also remember nursery rhymes and tongue-twisters by heart, and invent charades, wordplay, fantastical stories. Then they experiment in the garage, Matthew on keyboards loaded up with effects, Eleanor on vocals, strumming a guitar. They realize they have a gift: the ability to go beyond. No longer just games for suburban kids, no longer just repressed little passions. Something more, a genuine will to blend it all into a boundless microcosm of fantasy, and of songs. They decide to call themselves, appropriately, Fiery Furnaces.

They also discover they have an innate knack for turning words into deeds in no time at all. Almost entirely instinctive, "Gallowsbird's Park" (Rough Trade, 2003), their debut, after a few short recordings that would later be conveniently compiled (EP, 2005), is exactly what they hoped for: a surreal mosaic of melodies, a playful revisiting of the blues, packed with memorable moments. Their entire aesthetic is already there: the crooked, chaotic blues of Captain Beefheart's "Shiny Beast", the vital, visceral blues of the Rolling Stones' "Let It Bleed", by way of the intellectual grit of Patti Smith's "Radio Ethiopia" and the psychedelic crescendos of Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers". But deep down they're still not satisfied, because the two of them are already dreaming of blowing all this up into something almost monumental, even encyclopedic, like rock operas, like the great double albums, like the tortuous chains of psychedelia. And, at the same time, of sounding even more infectious than before.

New, extremely fast and joyful sessions carried out in total freedom, a story - or a handful of stories - stitched together and signed by Eleanor, with a few musician friends called in to lend a hand. That, essentially, is the raw material of "Blueberry Boat", the album that, just a year after their debut (already well regarded by the specialist press), launched them in 2004 into the pantheon of contemporary rock. The two diabolical siblings have now expanded their structures beyond measure, leaving behind the synthetic tracks of "Gallowsbird's Park": they've run them - with Matthew's stubbornness, ever more in command of his electronic keyboards - through the sieve of progressive rock, articulating and refining them deeply in both harmony and melody. They founded, perhaps even unwittingly, a new fantasy-rock for the 2000s. Not a mere, if significant, evolution, nor even a change of direction. Something that goes beyond.

And perhaps it's ambition we should be talking about too, as shown by the five mini-suites on the album, sitting alongside shorter, more concise tracks. The opening "Quay Cur", the most complex of the bunch, is admirable for its multifaceted blend of garage, hyped-up surf-rock, cybernetic beats and industrial-extraterrestrial noise in its long intro, sudden shifts in dynamics, and vocal melodies carved out with Eleanor's cheeky flair. A splendid little interlude of high notes and slide guitar launches a rockabilly-style sung passage in free verse. Piano towers over everything, and - in the finale - is given the task of leading a choral, conclusive arrangement after an enchanted sing-along for guitars and reworked sounds. The following "Straight Street" detonates a skewed, disjointed Chuck Berry-style rockabilly, then transfigured by a drumming piano and a Velvet Underground-esque guitar, before turning into a dialogue of verses and refrains delivered by Eleanor's quivering voice, with interludes of clownish little orchestras and imaginative variations.

"Chris Michaels", one of the album's peaks, instead kicks off with a masterful rock'n'roll sprint built on call-and-response (with a superb, powerful, spirited bass-and-drums section), between soaring vocal lines and swooping, roaring guitars, before giving way to psychedelic distortion and finally closing with a kind of languid, ironic piano ballad.

Later come "Mason City" and "Chief Inspector Blancheflower". The first is a piano-driven piece with further echoes of Jefferson Airplane, brooding spoken-word interludes (though always surrealist in the arrangement) and guitar jams that would make even Jorma Kaukonen jealous. The second is an electro collage narrated by Matthew, which in the middle boasts another fine pianistic uptempo, where Eleanor's deep vocal contortions get to perform with even more tension and emotional involvement, and in the finale seems to dismember the Who's "Tommy" to turn it into a Dadaist Frankenstein.

The Beefheart-esque masterpiece, the title-track (the other high point), distorts Eleanor's voice, makes the guitar alien, wears the keyboards to shreds, turns the rhythm into a crutch (not just a classic stomp). Three minutes in, the nursery rhyme finally kicks in, memorable in its counterpoint that's both catchy and dissonant at once. Then the two siblings singing in unison turn it surly and industrial, right up to a closing lyrical piano passage in free fantasy, into the final reprise, and a surreal saraband.

But the short tracks, the ones that in theory tie back to the previous record, are once again mini-suites stuffed with scene changes, wild digressions and unpredictable cut-and-paste, and it's precisely here that the duo finds its happiest melodic ideas. Take the techno-folk of "Spaniolated", with its "Venus In Furs"-like gait, further made dissonant and desecrated, amid ungainly organ solfeggios and guitars that almost recall the psychedelic irreverence of the Godz, and an epic, histrionic build-up of electronic effects. Or there's the garage-rock-vaudeville of "Birdie Brain", where keyboards and electro distortion units definitively replace the guitars, effective in its glowing synth textures and swirling piano lines (Matthew the conjuring showman, Eleanor the enchanting fairy), or again the brazen tap-dancing gospel of "My Dog Was Lost", which sublimates the triumphant progressions of musicals into avalanches of acid cacophony. "Turning Round" and "1917" (after a merry-go-round of drunken robots) are two choral pieces, sung by Eleanor like a moved hymn, for unison of organ, keyboards and voice with a pregnant baroque atmosphere, poised between an electro shiver and an experimental-cacophonous sortie. The closer ("Wolf Notes") is instead entrusted to a new tour de force of uncoordinated, abrasive sounds - as if the most easy-going Pere Ubu had taken up techno-pop - blighted by wailing slide guitar and impertinent keyboard flourishes, but again redeemed by yet another outburst of pianistic melody.

This is, with all due (and entirely justified) hyperbole, a manic "Twin Infinitives" (Royal Trux) of the new pop, an elusive "Pandora's Box" (Jim Steinman), a genuinely adolescent "Absolutely Free" (Frank Zappa). Mindful of progressive chain-reactions, almost Canterbury-esque in their sparkling visionary quality, governed by a direction that uses piano and keyboards to heighten the tones, dictate the movement, hold up the scaffolding, distort things into caricature, it's an unpredictable, fleeting treatise on mixed subgenres immediately re-exposed with instrumental richness and inventive relish, often astonishing in its eruptions of fantastical, melodic, honeyed, ironic flourishes. It brims with dazzling fun and profound tenderness. To this day, no record has set off down the road that Fiery Furnaces so clearly point to here (perhaps only Sufjan Stevens's "Illinois" comes close, at least in its long display of inventive flair and multiform orchestration), and which perhaps still doesn't have a name, but there are direct and indirect admirers, there is a genre, avant-pop, which draws its greatest sustenance from here. There are sensational possibilities ahead. The two siblings, co-authors of the music and lyrics, are backed - including in the era's live performances - by their friends Toshi Yano (bass and synth) and Andy Knowles (drums), both up-and-coming musicians. It was followed by two more pivotal works that break down and dig deeper into its two main dimensions: "Rehearsing My Choir" (2005), the creative operetta, and "Bitter Tea", the new song-format of the absurd (2006). The subconscious and the repressed, as posited by Freud, have finally become divertissement for new generations.

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16/03/2012