I rode around in my 1993 Ford Taurus/With a mandolin, a midget, and a stegosaurus
There's an especially poignant moment during The Royal Tenenbaums when Eli, a friend of the Tenenbaum children and a moderately successful author of dimly pretentious Westerns, confronts Margot Tenenbaum (whom he's sleeping with) about her review of his latest novel: "Why would a reviewer make the point of saying someone's not a genius? Do you especially think I'm not a genius?"
Well, I especially think that Matthew Friedberger is not a genius. Friedberger is the principle songwriter for the Fiery Furnaces, the band he shares with his sister, Eleanor. When the Furnaces arrived on the scene with 2003's Gallowsbird Bark, they came across as a less-ironic, more ramshackle version of the White Stripes - just another hipster band in the post-Strokes wave. It was their sophomore record, an ambitious homage to the rock opera form pioneered by Pete Townshend and The Who, that marked the Friedbergers out as Important Artists, affixing their stars in the indie rock firmament. Each track on Blueberry Boat, while interlinking with the others to form a convoluted narrative centered around the titular vessel, existed as a mini-opera unto itself, replete with breakneck shifts in melody, tempo, and mood mid-song. The record was somewhat divisive, with its constant twists and turns striking some as obnoxious diversions choking off interesting ideas before they had an opportunity to be fully realized - good songs spoiled, as it were. However, The Only Ears that Matter sided with the Furnaces: Pitchfork awarded Blueberry Boat a stellar 9.6 rating, while Stylus named it the best album of 2004.
As it turned out, Blueberry Boat was not intended by Matt Friedberger as a unique stylistic exercise - a one-off, as it were - but rather as an aesthetic manifesto for the group moving forward. For their follow-up record, 2005's Rehearsing My Choir, Friedberger developed an entire narrative around his grandmother's remembrances of her youth - a kind of family oral history project set in early-to-mid 20th century Chicago. To raise the stakes on an already dubious proposition, the grandmother would supply the vast majority of the vocals, making Choir less an indie rock album than a series of discreet monologues set to Friedberger's music. The end result was an instructive failure, revealing two significant truths about the band: 1) that Matthew does not have a lot of original or particularly interesting musical ideas, and 2) that Eleanor's unique voice and presence are without a doubt the key to the band's appeal. Subjected to a lot of #1 and little #2, the entire enterprise goes belly up.
Well, rather than split the difference, Widow City, the group's debut for Chicago's Thrill Jockey label, heaps on both Friedbergers, perfecting the bizarre Jimmy Stewart-Kim Novak Vertigo interplay that has increasingly come to characterize the duo's music. Eleanor is clearly her brother's muse and his foremost interpreter; her performances on the disc's 16 songs read less like a singer performing a song than an actress feeling her way around particularly a vexing scene. Each track is a negotiation, with Eleanor's bluesy-yet-precise alto weaving its way through the crevices between Matt's prolix lyrics and overbusy arrangements. She's copped to being barely able to remember Matthew's words in concert before, and her performances here continue to embody that high-wire tension: how much longer can she outrun her brother's increasingly intricate Rube Goldberg machines before she gets ground up in the gears?
Despite all of this built-in drama, however, Eleanor can only do so much to elevate the material. Matt's songs, though a significant improvement over the anonymity displayed on Bitter Tea, the band's last effort, still betray a paucity of new ideas. The best two tracks on the album are practically straight rips: "Ex-Guru" heavily quotes the melody from the Beatles' "In My Life" while "My Egyptian Grammar" reads like an alternate version of the Furnaces' own superior "Evergreen". Everything else hums along according to Friedberger's well-established formula, the lyrics a jumble of one fashionably oblique pronouncement piled atop the other until the syllables barely fit in Eleanor's mouth while the music roils about somewhere between a beat-up squeezebox and a Led Zeppelin cover band. In this regard, opener "The Philadelphia Grand Jury" serves as a kind of Stations of the Cross, with it's six minute run time basically daring the listener to remain interested as iteration after iteration of the same forgettable melody whiz by, building up to - well, building up to what, exactly? The fact is that Friedberger's compositions are like M. Night Shyamalan's thrillers, in that the ultimate purpose seems to be to set up some final twist, even if said twist doesn't ultimately prove germane to the plot. Fiery Furnaces songs turn and tumble and somersault simply because it is their raison d'etre.
Which brings me back to my initial point: Matt Friedberger is not a genius. I don't necessarily mean that in a pejorative sense: I enjoy a great deal of the Fiery Furnaces' work, and I think that Gallowsbird Bark, Blueberry Boat, and the singles comp EP amply demonstrate his considerable raw talent. But genius, to me, is somebody who definitively moves the goalposts forward with their work; that is, their way of thinking about a given problem is so advanced, so unique that it either anticipates or directly causes a paradigm shift. Friedberger doesn't seem to be thinking about his chosen problem - crafting pop songs - much at all. Instead, as he laid out in a recent interview with the Village Voice, he's sifting through obscure bric-a-brac - er, I mean "found objects" - repurposing unusual and arcane phrases to form his lyrics. Yet the flotsam and jetsam finding its way into Friedberger's verbal collages is not being recontextualized so much as it is being deprived of any context whatsoever; the end product sounds cool intermittently, but is utterly devoid of any newfound meaning. Not that I begrudge him that - after all, pop music needn't be edifying to be successful. But it's one thing to make art that is free of all complexity, and another thing to dress up facile art as being complex.
Well, I especially think that Matthew Friedberger is not a genius. Friedberger is the principle songwriter for the Fiery Furnaces, the band he shares with his sister, Eleanor. When the Furnaces arrived on the scene with 2003's Gallowsbird Bark, they came across as a less-ironic, more ramshackle version of the White Stripes - just another hipster band in the post-Strokes wave. It was their sophomore record, an ambitious homage to the rock opera form pioneered by Pete Townshend and The Who, that marked the Friedbergers out as Important Artists, affixing their stars in the indie rock firmament. Each track on Blueberry Boat, while interlinking with the others to form a convoluted narrative centered around the titular vessel, existed as a mini-opera unto itself, replete with breakneck shifts in melody, tempo, and mood mid-song. The record was somewhat divisive, with its constant twists and turns striking some as obnoxious diversions choking off interesting ideas before they had an opportunity to be fully realized - good songs spoiled, as it were. However, The Only Ears that Matter sided with the Furnaces: Pitchfork awarded Blueberry Boat a stellar 9.6 rating, while Stylus named it the best album of 2004.
As it turned out, Blueberry Boat was not intended by Matt Friedberger as a unique stylistic exercise - a one-off, as it were - but rather as an aesthetic manifesto for the group moving forward. For their follow-up record, 2005's Rehearsing My Choir, Friedberger developed an entire narrative around his grandmother's remembrances of her youth - a kind of family oral history project set in early-to-mid 20th century Chicago. To raise the stakes on an already dubious proposition, the grandmother would supply the vast majority of the vocals, making Choir less an indie rock album than a series of discreet monologues set to Friedberger's music. The end result was an instructive failure, revealing two significant truths about the band: 1) that Matthew does not have a lot of original or particularly interesting musical ideas, and 2) that Eleanor's unique voice and presence are without a doubt the key to the band's appeal. Subjected to a lot of #1 and little #2, the entire enterprise goes belly up.
Well, rather than split the difference, Widow City, the group's debut for Chicago's Thrill Jockey label, heaps on both Friedbergers, perfecting the bizarre Jimmy Stewart-Kim Novak Vertigo interplay that has increasingly come to characterize the duo's music. Eleanor is clearly her brother's muse and his foremost interpreter; her performances on the disc's 16 songs read less like a singer performing a song than an actress feeling her way around particularly a vexing scene. Each track is a negotiation, with Eleanor's bluesy-yet-precise alto weaving its way through the crevices between Matt's prolix lyrics and overbusy arrangements. She's copped to being barely able to remember Matthew's words in concert before, and her performances here continue to embody that high-wire tension: how much longer can she outrun her brother's increasingly intricate Rube Goldberg machines before she gets ground up in the gears?
Despite all of this built-in drama, however, Eleanor can only do so much to elevate the material. Matt's songs, though a significant improvement over the anonymity displayed on Bitter Tea, the band's last effort, still betray a paucity of new ideas. The best two tracks on the album are practically straight rips: "Ex-Guru" heavily quotes the melody from the Beatles' "In My Life" while "My Egyptian Grammar" reads like an alternate version of the Furnaces' own superior "Evergreen". Everything else hums along according to Friedberger's well-established formula, the lyrics a jumble of one fashionably oblique pronouncement piled atop the other until the syllables barely fit in Eleanor's mouth while the music roils about somewhere between a beat-up squeezebox and a Led Zeppelin cover band. In this regard, opener "The Philadelphia Grand Jury" serves as a kind of Stations of the Cross, with it's six minute run time basically daring the listener to remain interested as iteration after iteration of the same forgettable melody whiz by, building up to - well, building up to what, exactly? The fact is that Friedberger's compositions are like M. Night Shyamalan's thrillers, in that the ultimate purpose seems to be to set up some final twist, even if said twist doesn't ultimately prove germane to the plot. Fiery Furnaces songs turn and tumble and somersault simply because it is their raison d'etre.
Which brings me back to my initial point: Matt Friedberger is not a genius. I don't necessarily mean that in a pejorative sense: I enjoy a great deal of the Fiery Furnaces' work, and I think that Gallowsbird Bark, Blueberry Boat, and the singles comp EP amply demonstrate his considerable raw talent. But genius, to me, is somebody who definitively moves the goalposts forward with their work; that is, their way of thinking about a given problem is so advanced, so unique that it either anticipates or directly causes a paradigm shift. Friedberger doesn't seem to be thinking about his chosen problem - crafting pop songs - much at all. Instead, as he laid out in a recent interview with the Village Voice, he's sifting through obscure bric-a-brac - er, I mean "found objects" - repurposing unusual and arcane phrases to form his lyrics. Yet the flotsam and jetsam finding its way into Friedberger's verbal collages is not being recontextualized so much as it is being deprived of any context whatsoever; the end product sounds cool intermittently, but is utterly devoid of any newfound meaning. Not that I begrudge him that - after all, pop music needn't be edifying to be successful. But it's one thing to make art that is free of all complexity, and another thing to dress up facile art as being complex.
