The Fiery Furnaces "Widow City" (Thrill Jockey) Sounds Like: A fearless step in the right direction.
Love them or hate them, The Fiery Furnaces (brother-sister duo Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger) are two of the most imaginative musical artists of their generation. Fusing blues garage rock with electronica, The Fiery Furnaces have developed a signature sound unlike any of their experimental rock contemporaries.
Over the span of their seven-year career, the Friedbergers have crafted some truly avant-garde work. Taking chances either yields success or failure, and The Fiery Furnaces have come across their share of both. In 2004, they released their dizzying masterpiece concept album "Blueberry Boat," which marked the Furnaces' first full-fledged experimentation with electronica. The very next year, the Friedbergers gave the concept album another go with "Rehearsing My Choir," which chronicles stories from their grandmother's life with lyrics in spoken word. In the end, the album was an utter misfire with its overwhelming composition and disengaging vocals.
With "Widow City," the Friedbergers have managed to juggle their rambunctious creativity and literary lyrics with grace and ease. While on prior Fiery Furnaces albums, tracks span over seven minutes and tend to be a fusion of two or three separate songs, "Widow City" offers primarily short songs that stylistically remain uniform from start to finish. It's refreshing to see the Furnaces break down their songs into distinct tracks rather than hodgepodge them together into epic musical patchworks. Despite its inherent quirks, "Widow City" might be the most accessible Furnaces album next to 2005's "EP."
Indeed, had the Friedbergers omitted a handful of annoyingly eccentric tracks, such as "Uncle Charlie" and "Restorative Beer," this would have had potential to be a tight album, yet its final composition is somewhat bloated. The finest tracks on "Widow City" are "My Egyptian Grammar," "Japanese Sleepers" and "Duplexes of the Dead," which employs a synthesizer filter on the acoustic guitar to establish eerie ambiance. Although this might be the closest that The Fiery Furnaces are going to get to minimalism, "Widow City" is a bustling herald of greater things to come.
-DONNY T. SHELDON
