Fiery Furnaces - Widow City
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CD Details
Artist: Fiery FurnacesEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2007-10-09
Music Label: Thrill Jockey
Soundtracks:
- Philadelphia Grand Jury, The
- Duplexes Of The Dead
- Automatic Husband
- Ex-Guru
- Clear Signal From Cairo
- My Egyptian Grammar
- Old Hag Is Sleeping, The
- Japanese Slippers
- Navy Nurse
- Uncle Charlie
- Right By Conquest
- Restorative Beer
- Wicker Whatnots
- Cabaret Of The Seven Devils
- Pricked In The Heart
- Widow City
Music reviews of Widow City
Music Review: Widows, lovers and jellyfish
Rating: 4 Stars
After exploring just about everything else, the Fiery Furnaces have embraced their inner indie-rocker.
And their sixth full-length album "Widow City" weaves together music-hall, electronic pop, and a twisted, colourful brand of rock'n'roll. It's more angular and jagged than anything they've done before, like a hard-rock band that took acid in a children's museum.
It opens with sharp drums and a tight, sputtery riff. For one horrible moment it sounds like they've abandoned their signature sound for more "typical" rock music...
.... then the melody fills with piano, flute, keyboard and sharp thickets of synth, and you know they haven't lost their touch, or their electro-music-hall trappings. It's a wonderfully dark pop song, especially when Eleanor Friedberger turns cynical about a court's decision ("We already know/there ain't no suspense/That the Philadelphia Grand Jury strings me up").
The songs that follow are just as dense, intense and strange: gurgling electropop, thundering rock clouds, fuzzy fast pop melodies, drum explosions, quirky experimentals, bouncy schizophrenic pop melodies, driving powerpop with circus edges, and roiling combinations of electro-rock and psychedelic music-hall -- basically, any and all combinations of their past work.
In fact, if "Widow City" has an overriding flaw, it's that it's almost TOO densely packed. Since the melodies are catchier, the Friedberger siblings apparently compensated by smashing loads of quirky instrumentation around typical rock rhythms. It's a lot to digest all at once -- try listening to it one or two songs at a time, to get the full effect.
Yeah, there are angular guitars, drums and basslines, especially in songs like "Clear Signal From Cairo" and "Navy Nurse." They're the backbone of many of the songs. But they're wrapped in cascading mellotron, scrapes of synth, samples, monkey noises, keyboard, tootling flutes, rippling piano, shimmering chimes, et cetera. Ye gods, is there anything they can't mold into a fun pop melody?
Against the backdrop of her brother's musical madness, Eleanor's smooth vocals sound pretty normal. Sometimes the songs are just rambles, and sometimes they're full of vivid imagery ("No more revenge cobbler or whiskey pie/My cheeks will be the color of dead jellyfish") and clever wordplay ("By all means, my liege/lay siege, lay siege").
The Fiery Furnaces twist all their musical styles into a insane patchwork, also called "Widow City." It's way too much to take in at once, but what fun to be overwhelmed with their music...
Description of Widow City
This brother-sister duo balance melody, originality, and a seemingly endless arsenal of instrumental ideas. Their songs often transcend categories, redefining the pop song through rapidly changing tempos and inventive sound selections. This record, their first on Thrill Jockey, features some of the finest, catchiest Furnace compositions to date. Compelling, beautiful, strange, dense, and magical, "Widow City" is musical terrain entirely of the duo's making. Vinyl is a double LP in an old style tip-on gatefold jacket, and includes a coupon for a free MP3 download of the entire album.On their fifth full length (and first for indie stalwarts Thrill Jockey), Fiery Furnaces have finally made an album that reconciles their need to make literate, strangely fashioned art-pop with their pummeling and super rocked-out live shows. It's tempting to wish that at least a few of these puzzling tunes could have fewer parts and to concentrate on the pleasant melodic elements more, or maybe just not switch back and forth between the piano-based songs and the guitar-based ones. But that's a bit like showing up at a MENSA party and complaining that folks are using too many big words; baroque, over-fashioned, and over-thought post-modern pop is what this duo does. On Widow City, the good-looking brother-sister team does it better than they ever have. This record's delightful and wholly original; no one else could possibly have made it. Reveling in a playground based on distorted riffs and deep space synths from the era of "album rock," their distended sounds swim about like hundreds of liberated sea monkeys. --Mike McGonigal
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