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Fiery Furnaces
Blueberry Boat
Rough Trade
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Article
written by Ged M
Aug 30, 2004.
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The first Fiery Furnaces album consisted of demos that Rough Trade liked so much they issued them as they were. The second album is more produced, more layered, much longer (76 minutes) and can fairly be described as progressive-pop. It’s full of ambition, vision and nerve (who else would dare to make music like this these days?). For a whole range of reasons it’s essential listening.
There are shades of the late 60s/ early 70s, when there seemed to be no limits for the inspired musician; it resembles most the Who’s ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ and ‘Rael’ but you can detect the Beach Boys, 70s soft-rock, music hall and the blues in there in unique combinations. The songs are poetic in structure as they begin, switch themes, time signatures and singers (Matt sings a lot more on this one) and then return to closing codas. It’s not a concept album but it’s not so distant from a rock opera either.
‘Quay Cur’ is the perfect example. It’s 10”25’ of movement and change, full of synths and piano and inspired by the usual obsessions with water and geography, and with the most brilliant use of language. The love of words reminds me of Patti Smith but the lyrics (mostly Matt’s) flow in a torrent of prose, modern and archaic, with an intoxicating rhythm. There’s a strong historical flavour to the song; you don’t need to understand it all but the more you know, the more dimensions open up. (The same goes for ‘1917’ with its baseball references to old Chicago White Sox players.) They refer to medieval weapons like the saker and revive nautical words like “spoom” (“to be driven steadily and swiftly, as before a strong wind” according to Webster’s 1913 dictionary) while the language in the second half of the song belongs to what we’d called the Inuit now, and is taken from Richard Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages in Search of the North West Passage’. And all that learning is there to add flavour to the song rather than just to show off. It proves that you can make fantastic, elemental pop music and not rhyme “moon”, “spoon” and “June”. So fuck you Pete Waterman!
Elsewhere, ‘Mason City’, is multi-parted with great melodies and bizarre, perhaps invented, lyrics. ‘Paw Paw Tree’ is experimental while ‘Blueberry Boat’ has lots of slightly discordant piano and you can detect the influence of Brian Wilson’s ‘Smile’. ‘My Dog Was Lost But Now He’s Found’ has been part of their set as long as they’ve played in England but here it’s a piano-driven, loping blues with machine gun vocals and a claustrophobic air. The wonderful ‘Chris Michaels’ is typical of the album, full of contrast, from melodic pop song to showtunes to what sounds like another song entirely, all held together with the most perfect pop melody.
There’s often an Edward Lear-like sense of the ridiculous in the songs. ‘Straight Street’ has both the lines: “If he beats you for the battle of hearts and minds/ tell ‘em we use pig by-products in our designs” and a lunatic list of European Championship football teams while ‘Chief Inspector Blancheflower’ recounts a transformation from failed typewriter mender to policeman.
The term “classic” can only be conferred in retrospect; you can never tell when an album’s released what’s going to last and join one of those Nick Hornby lists. But this has so much depth that even after weeks of listening to the album on import, I’m still finding new things tucked away, a small string arrangement or a literary or historical reference that’ll keep me and Google busy for a while yet. You can admire them for it on one level but above all, you can just sit back enjoy the most astonishing and challenging album you’ll hear for some time.
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