Seldom Said But Often Heard

The Fiery Furnaces @ Hiro Ballroom 11/3/2007
The Philadelphia Grand Jury / Navy Nurse / My Egyptian Grammar / Evergreen / Duplexes of the Dead / Automatic Husband / Ex-Guru / Black-Hearted Boy / Bitter Tea / Right By Conquest / A Candy Maker’s Knife In My Handbag /48-23 22nd Street / Seven Silver Curses / Slavin’ Away / Japanese Slippers / Widow City / Restorative Beer / Clear Signal To Cairo / Inca Rag (incomplete, Eleanor can’t recall the words) / Whistle Rhapsody / Blueberry Boat / My Dog Was Lost But Now He’s Found / Single Again (with a bit of Smelling Cigarettes) / Don’t Dance Her Down

The Fiery Furnaces “Duplexes of the Dead / Automatic Husband / Ex-Guru (Live on KCRW)” – Remember a couple months ago when I was really let down by that terrible Fiery Furnaces concert in Astoria where they basically spent an hour or so ruthlessly butchering their own material? You know how I was all “man, they really need to get back to actually playing the songs instead of trying to shoehorn them into entirely different pieces of music”? Well, I got my wish.

The current incarnation of the band is mostly the same (Eleanor on vocals, Matthew on keyboards, Jason Loewenstein on bass, and Bob D’Amico on drums), but this tour marks the first time since around Gallowsbird’s Bark that the group has performed in a relatively conventional manner, i.e., adapting the songs from the new album to streamlined live arrangements (keyboard/bass/drums) without warping their structure or melodies. For the first time since the final stages of the hard rock tour for Bitter Tea, it seemed as though the Friedbergers actually enjoyed performing their own songs, and weren’t trying to turn them into something else. Next to the Blueberry Boat medley show at Webster Hall in early 2005, this was the best set I’ve ever seen the Furnaces play, and a lot of that had to do with the fact that the band opted to play up its strengths — Matthew’s skill with keyboards, the subtleties of Eleanor’s voice, the fluid melodies of the Widow City songs — rather than indulge in a passive-aggressive game with the audience. They definitely took liberties with the older material, but it was never at the expense of the tunes. The medley of Rehearsing My Choir songs in the middle of the set was a revelation, with the band slipping into Dave Brubeck-ish jazzy versions that highlighted an elegance in the material that was buried beneath the deliberate ramshackle quality of the original studio recordings.

If you’d like to actually hear this concert, the lovely man who runs the NYCtaper site recorded it and has it up on his site right now in flac format. It’s kind of a hassle to decode those flac files, but it’s totally worth it. If you would like to hear the remainder of that KCRW studio session in the always delightful and convenient mp3 format, I refer you to The Smudge of Ashen Fluff.

Pit er Pat “Skeletons” – Though a majority of my taste in music is fairly well documented on this site over the years, there’s certain things that fall through the cracks, either because I feel that it’d be boring for you if I were to start writing at length about finally grasping the greatness of Led Zeppelin at the age of 26, or I simply don’t have much to say about it, which is the case for pretty much any of the vintage Studio One and Trojan reggae compilations that I have on my shelf. When I put that music on, I’m not thinking about it, and that’s kinda the point. It’s all feeling — most often a cozy, warm feeling — and though it’s lovely to hear while reading or falling asleep, it’d be torturous for me if I tried to write about it at length.

Before having seen this show on Saturday night, I’d never really heard Pit er Pat, so I had no idea what to expect from them. I mean, I knew they were on Thrill Jockey, and that’s something of a hint, but I wasn’t quite ready to be blown away by this ridiculously talented trio who picked up elements from reggae, jazz, indie rock, and Middle Eastern and Mediterranean music and transformed into something that was simultaneously comfortable and a bit alien. I was especially knocked out by their second song, a longish instrumental that married a elaborate, winding guitar melody to a dubby, in-the-womb bass line straight out of classic Studio One. (Seriously, it sounded VERY familiar.)

Unfortunately, it seems as though a majority of the songs that the band played are new, and that their available studio recordings are not quite on the level of this show. This isn’t to say that they aren’t good — the tracks on their 2006 record Pyramids lean heavier on jazz and indie, and have a different sort of charm for the most part — but believe me, I’m extremely eager to hear how their next record will turn out, and I’m hopeful that it will turn up sometime in 2008. (Click here to buy it from Thrill Jockey.)