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Fiery Furnaces
Growing up in Oak Park, brother and sister Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger must have ridden bikes past the Nathan G. Moore house. It’s an early Frank Lloyd Wright work, and architecturally speaking, it’s a fucking mess. The mustard-and-chocolate monstrosity mashes together Tudor frames, rococo flourishes, gargoyles, classical columns, Gothic apses and modern lines. The anything-goes show-off piece is fascinating to look at, but you’d never want to live in it.
And that’s pretty much been the case with the Friedbergers’ Fiery Furnaces records: scatterbrained jumbles of art-pop ideas and the dense, nonsensical ramble-singing of Eleanor. She hasn’t met a chorus she failed to stuff with an entire short story of traveling salesmen or amnesiac tourists. Brilliant in spots, but overwhelming as a whole, Furnaces’ LPs would be impenetrable if not for their silly enthusiasm.
The duo’s sixth studio album makes great effort to strip away bells and whistles. Gone are the farty synthesizers, kazoos, sound effects and ten-minute run times. Here, the arrangements stick to a standard cocktail-lounge lineup of bass, drums, guitar and piano, all bathed in warm, organic production.
Perhaps not surprisingly, straightforwardness does not suit the Friedbergers. When jazzy percussion, boogie-woogie ivory-twinkling and light 12-bar riffing congeal in noodling passages of “Charmaine Champagne” and “Staring at the Steeple,” you’d be excused for thinking you’re listening to a Phish or Zappa record. A few simpler soul-tinged numbers like “Cut the Cake” and the upbeat finger-snapper “Keep Me in the Dark” fortunately breeze by like Pavement’s dweeby best.
The Fiery Furnaces crank out a lot of records. Hopefully on the next one they’ll stop merely peeling away layers, tinkering with the same old weird house, and just bulldoze the goofy framework to the ground. Somewhere in them is a Fallingwater.
Fiery Furnaces play the Hideout Thursday 9, FitzGerald's Friday 10 and Millennium Park Saturday 11.
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