The Fiery Furnaces
Rehearsing My Choir

THE REVIEW

"Dad, we need to put the car in the furnace." This quote from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," a children's movie from 1968, combined with the biblical and solemn reference to a “baptism by fire,” brings with it the name of the Chicago-based band residing in New York. And thus “The Fiery Furnaces”. “Rehearsing My Choir” is their third LP; a Rough Trade record, dated 2005, twin to the subsequent “Bitter Tea,” but unrelated to it and its predecessors, because it is more experimental and detached from song form.

This time Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger enlisted their over-eighty grandmother, Olga Sarantos, former director of the Christian Orthodox Church choir of Oak Park, their native suburb; she is entrusted with the long melodramatic narration of personal life episodes and circumstantial anecdotes of 1940s Illinois, in a continuous, almost uninterrupted, ineluctable stream of consciousness. With the orator engages, in an intergenerational exchange, often satirical, Eleanor: her voice is situated halfway between Chrissie Hynde and Grace Slick. Charming and affable as the Pretender, she boasts the persistent beauty of the latter, yet devoid of that same expressive power.

Upon the storytelling, spoken and recited, are aggregated Matthew's bizarre inventions and variations, alternating frenetic, polyphonic, incisive moments with slow, clear, and minimal inflections. Keyboards abound, sometimes solemn, sometimes playful, sometimes classical, sometimes weighted down like the Residents. Then harpsichords, electric and sometimes acoustic guitars, electronic loops, analog and digital cacophonies settle into uneven collages, into fragments of songs and changing sketches, into stylistic features and “flies in the bottle.” Gestures prevail over sounds, atmospheres over harmonies, harmonies over melodies. The imperative is to defy expectations, avoid catchy folky refrains already amiably effused in “Gallowsbird’s Bark” and the eponymous EP.

In the Friedberger siblings' imaginative world, Marcel Proust meets Walter Benjamin: having lost the unequivocal meaning of truth-aletheia, we can only access fragments of meaning and exploded constellations of meanings, aligning them with each other in search of chiasmatic correspondences, even between memories and discontinuous hopes.

Between Prog ambitions and amateurism à la Fugs, Indie Pop is elevated to Art Rock by the Fiery Furnaces. Avant-Pop is tinged with vivid variety and elusive concreteness, synth-pop and garage blues, in multifaceted, heterogeneous, sometimes thorny textures, between syncretism and idiosyncrasies. There are no conventional songs or those reducible to a canonical structure. There’s also no twisted Stonian blues that hovered in the immediate predecessor, the excellent “Blueberry Boat.” Never before have the “Fiery Furnaces” proved as useful for producing bricks and mortar: so Beefheart, Zappa, Residents via “Third Reich Rock'n'Roll,” Pere-Ubu via “Modern Dance,” the debuting Faust, the Royal Trux, the Devo, the Gong, the Kinks, and still the amateurism of the Shaggs and the professionalism of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy, in attitudes, if not in the fragmentary forms, become a total patch-work, a rock opera entirely unfastened, with complex scores, without apparent coherence, without lyricism. The sound of memories emerges rhapsodic, Indie Prog experimentation becomes in some way “fast and bulbous.”

The Garfield El, the first track, opens precisely with a rambling speech by Grandma Olga at Captain Beefheart's “Fast and bulbous”: “Faster Hammers” she repeats, in a continuous evocation, traversing a sabbat of keyboards gone crazy with joy. Wayward Granddaughter, with a chirping jaw harp and a caressing harpsichord, on which are grafted disco beat percussion, starts as a song then drifts, finally rattling on the strings of a stooge-like electric garage. These two tracks perfectly epitomize the entire concept album. Among the other pieces, all at least seven minutes long, Slavin Away hints at a plausible Folk melody, only to quickly obfuscate it.

An album hard to listen to, difficult to comprehend. Irrational, polyhedral sound collages, hyperboles, landscapes visible only in glimpses. Compositional Dadaism, reluctant to form, in an apparently organized chaos. The most improbable idea of a rock opera.

Did Grandma perhaps disown it?