Rating My CD's: The Squarest Thing On the Jukebox

21. The Fiery Furnaces -- I'm Going Away

The Book of Daniel tells a story (Dn 3) of the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar, conqueror of Jerusalem, destroyer of Solomon's Temple, building a Golden Statue and demanding that all his subjects worship it. Three Jews refuse to do so, and Nebuchadnezzar throws them into a fiery furnace to be burned to death. Instead, an angel of God comes to the rescue, and they stand in the fire unharmed, until the king notices. He then proclaims that the God who could do such a thing is the greatest of all gods, and showers the three Jews with riches and favors.

I mention this because the actual band the Fiery Furnaces seems unaware of it. In a deeply uninteresting "In My Room" feature in the October 2007 issue of Spin (Golly! Rock Stars have kitchens! With stuff in them!), Eleanor Friedberger claims that "Our band name comes from a line in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." Although other web sites have claimed a double-reference to CCBB and the Bible, this review of Rehearsing My Choir, the FF's 2005 album, sticks to the initial story. And while I'd like to believe that the Brooklyn hipster duo behind this album know obscure stories from Old Testament Prophets, somehow that first story rings the truer.



I bought this on the recommendation of my brother, who is a musician in his own right. We don't always agree on music -- if I go in more for raucous bang-bang-rock-n'-roll, he's more in the jam/blues/jazz tradition. But we do have some points in common, and we have gotten to the point where we know what the other will like: for his last birthday I picked up a Robert Fripp album that the dug quite a bit. For his part, he recommended that I get into the Furnaces.

After listening to this album, and digesting it, I still feel like I haven't really heard them. This album seems off to me somehow, like there's something I'm missing. The title track shoots things off promisingly, a kind of alt-rockabilly croon-session, powerful in its juxtaposition of intimacy and the great big kiss-off. But on continuing listens I wonder why the lyrics keep repeating.

I mean, it's one thing to revisit the first chorus at the end. Lots of songs do that. It's quite another to repeat them three or four times as though you hadn't just sung them. This happens on several songs, most egregiously on "Drive to Dallas." It becomes jarring, then embarassing, and finally tedious, to hear Eleanor labor to find a new way to sing "I'm not going to drive to Dallas with blurry eyes ever again."

But that's nothing compared to the fact that "Cups and Punches" steals whole lines from "Charmaine Champagne" (which itself has a line about "cups and punches" in it), lines that we'd become well familiar with in the first song. My brain can't take it. I can't even remember what the song after "Cups and Punches" sounds like.

I could dismiss all of this as simple laziness by a pair of hipster siblings, but I don't want to. I want to consider seriously that the Friedbergers intended some kind of Charmaine/Cups diptych, an idea mirroring itself. And such might be the plan behind all those wrung-out repetitions: exploring the facets of sound and meaning, wondering if any one could turn them on.

Or this, could be a band kicking up a dust of weirdness to keep the casual listeners away, rather like when the White Stripes put out Get Behind Me Satan, an album guarunteed to turn off anyone who hadn't been with the Stripes since at least White Blood Cells. That annoying kitchen interview in Spin has Eleanor posing in her hipster-girl uniform, and she seems unutterably bored with the whole business. I can't say I blame her.

Or, it could just suck. In which case, going away may be good for them for a while.

Grade: OK