Love/Hate

I find something incredibly annoying about music created for art's sake. I think it's pompous and boring for a band to squeeze obtuse sounds out of arcane instruments, while floating obscure literary references in a sea of words handpicked from multitudinous thesauri (yes, I pluralized it.) What can I say? It's a pet peeve. As with my chosen reading material, I require a certain discernible point. This doesn't have to be a concrete allegory, it could very well be another question, but there has to be something that you can take away with you in the end.

This little pet peeve has often led me away from music by the Fiery Furnaces. Yes, there's something intriguing about a sibling band that writes a whole album dedicated to their deceased grandmother, but I can't often stomach the seemingly purposeful inaccessibility of their music. I mostly ignored Rehearsing My Choir (the aforementioned grandmother album), Blueberry Boat, and Bitter Tea. "Benton Harbor Blues" was the one song from these three albums that I found at all interesting, but at over seven minutes even this song was a little too intensely cheery for my ears to handle.

Widow City was released last fall, and its eighteen tracks are only slightly more accessible than those found on the other albums. Still, I find this album immensely enjoyable in small doses. If you made me listen to all eighteen songs in a row, I think I might never listen to the Fiery Furnaces again, but "The Philadelphia Grand Jury" and "Automatic Husband" are actually incredibly enjoyable rock/pop tunes. There's a definite continuity to this album that cannot be found on the other Fiery Furnaces' releases. The instrumental flourishes are similar from song to song, and the vocals are steadier and more self-assured. Unfortunately, the lyrics still lean more towards Dadaism than Impressionism or even Surrealism. In order to analyze the lines and stanzas, you practically need to be in the writer's head, and I have a sneaking suspicion that any underlying meaning you eventually uncovered would still be annoyingly personal. In the end though, I'm unable to completely write off the Fiery Furnaces. Let's hope this is a band that becomes more accessible with age.