Combustible kin

>> Fiery Furnaces have undermined their
potential success by handling their pop
inclinations like a hot potato, but their
latest record, Widow City, finds the
brother-sister duo keeping their cool

TIME TO TORMENT: Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“What are you talking about?” asks Matthew Friedberger by e-mail, scandalized by my suggestion that the Fiery Furnaces don’t want or expect to ever become popular—he’s said as much to reporters in the past.

“We want to be the biggest band in the world,” he claims now. “But, you know, we can’t make records we don’t like or think are redundant.”

The nauseating prospect of being boring is what drives Friedberger to test the limits of rock, alongside his sister Eleanor. Fiery Furnaces channel the pioneers of blues, funk, mod, glam, synthpunk, psychedelia and rock ’n’ roll, reduce and restructure their sounds with boldly skewed guitars, pianos, synths, strings and percussion, creating a bed of down and spikes on which Eleanor’s nimble croon and agitated narration lie.

“We don’t have some big idea,” said Matthew to Splendid magazine in 2003. “We have to kind of mix up slightly different styles to make it not so deadly dull, to make our simple songs not so bad, and so we really have to sweat the details.”

Sweating the details often prompts arguments between the siblings, whose incessant bickering was the focus of early Fiery Furnaces press—to the delight of British reporters, the pair would often produce dirty laundry during interviews. White Stripes comparisons were common too, despite the gulf between the two bands’ approaches to blues-rock, a term which utterly fails to describe Matthew and Eleanor’s work. And unlike the Whites, the Friedbergers are bona fide blood relatives, complete with tales of traumatic childhood teasing.

He tormented her, but he also encouraged her musical inclination, buying her first instruments as gifts. He was a music snob from an early age, and a trained bassist who played in a series of rock bands. When he moved from their native Chicago to New York City in 2000, she spent much of the year travelling in Europe and the U.K. (home to her current boyfriend, Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand) before moving in with Matthew for nine hellish months.

They could never be roommates again, but he convinced her to front a band. She hated it at first, but once their debut album Gallowsbird Bark was released by Rough Trade in 2003, they were entrenched in the shit and proceeded to dig themselves in deeper.

“Who doesn’t want to play music,” he asks, “if they’re given a chance?”

Use hearing protection

On tour in support of 2004’s Blueberry Boat, the Friedbergers played their sets as a medley, non-stop, the way the record is presented. In the studio, the band paired odd time signatures and uneven rhythms with appealing melodies and neat arrangements, but on stage, they further challenged listeners by radically altering the songs. In 2005, Matthew told Time Out New York that, “When we go on tour, we don’t build a fan base—we reduce a fan base.”

This counterintuitive M.O. seemed to inspire their next studio album, Rehearsing My Choir, a collaboration with their then 81-year-old grandmother. The record received a wide range of ratings, with over half of the reviews on Metacritic.com giving it a failing grade—I gave it 4.5/10 in this publication. Matthew told Time Out at the time, “We could have made a record that sounded like the Arcade Fire or Laura Branigan, but instead we made this thing that willfully tries to hurt listeners.”

The same can be said about Matthew’s self-indulgent solo double-album of 2006, Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School. But between sadistic records, Fiery Furnaces quietly released EP, a compilation of outtakes that would’ve helped their popularity prospects tremendously had it been a proper album—its contents were presumably relegated to the rarity file for being overly accessible. Last year’s Bitter Tea was a clear return to form, and to the tension between the duo’s melodic prowess, novel arrangements and ingrown eclecticism. And the latest product from the prolific pair, now signed to Thrill Jockey, is their boldest flirtation with pop to date.

“We wanted to make a record using a conventional rock rhythm section,” he says. “We hadn’t done that before.”

You’ve come a long way, baby

On Widow City, as Matthew recently told Tier 3, “We try to sound like somebody trying to listen to Led Zeppelin and Paul McCartney records through a Magic Eight Ball or Parker Brothers Ouija Board game,” later restating his inspiration as “’70s sounds” and “’70s pop artifacts.” The latter would seem like an easy restriction for any indie band, given that so many strains of underground music began to flourish in the ’70s, as did the ugly side of hippie culture, the downward spiral of American politics (Fiery Furnaces once tackled Bush in a song about the bubonic plague) and the rise of the urban decay and suburban alienation that gave birth to punk. But in our e-mail exchange, Matthew claimed that the record’s roots are much more boring than the results would have you believe.

“It was meant to be made up of things from ’72-’75 American rock radio ‘culture’ and ‘You’ve come along way, baby,’ Virginia Slims-style pop feminism from contemporary print ads,” he explains. “Now, we don’t imagine we have anything intelligent to add or show with this material. But making a record with it was very interesting technically, in terms of both songwriting and recording. And, we hope, fun to listen to.”

Propelled by airtight rhythm, eruptive guitars, elegant strings, saccharine keys and flute, the hour-long record feels like a glam opera played by rock hippies, jazz beatniks and a prog beardo or two, with Eleanor running through a series of shaggy stage sets spewing one long, frenetic narrative like a surreal, speed-addled Patti Smith. It certainly keeps you on your toes, but it’s a pleasure to listen to end to end, a storm with impeccably orchestrated calm interrupted regularly by bursts of chaos.

The Friedbergers have used one of the songs from Widow City, “Cabaret of the Seven Devils,” to springboard a songwriting competition on their Web site. First, competitors must write lyrics featuring synonyms of all the words in the song title, which will likely lead them to imitate the band’s choppy surrealist travelogues. “The entries have been uniformly brilliant, of course!” Matthew says.

Skill over soul

Another endeavour announced on the band’s Web site is a six-part adaptation of Lo Cunto de li Cunti, a 17th century book that introduced many of the major archetypes of fairy tales. Precisely what form this will take is unclear, but they intend not to translate the title, partly because, Matthew admits, of the inherent shock value of “cunt.”

“You know, we don’t believe in an art of so-called ideas. We believe in an art of technique,” he says, when asked whether his work is driven by emotion or intellect. “What matters is your skill at whatever it is you’re trying to do. The problem for rock music, for thinking about it or making it, is what counts as skill? What kind of skills are important? It’s very unclear.”

Maybe their conundrums and contradictions are best left mysterious. What is clear is that Fiery Furnaces have the means to soothe the soul, challenge the mind and even move the butt, though they’re too detached to touch the heart.

They are being kind to the fans on this tour, however, playing their songs as they were recorded, roughly. But they’ll always have their detractors, judging from the criticism of Widow City. While most reviews of the relatively accessible record have been positive, the duo still seems to inspire love or hate, the latter in The Austin Chronicle, who deemed the record “pretentious, superfluous, and ultimately unlistenable.”

Matthew once told CokeMachineGlow, “I love to read bad reviews because you see if they get you or if it’s just stupid.” But after I admitted to him that I hated about one third of his band’s discography, he said, “Don’t care. But you know what they say, don’t you? In this world, strong opinions are a luxury and a presumption. But the customer is always right, right?”

With MGMT at Cabaret Musée Juste Pour
Rire on Tuesday, Dec. 11, 9 p.m., $15