Ryan ChartrandWhen The Fiery Furnaces hit the stage, destruction and creation become one and the same. They destroy the familiarity of their recorded songs, reconstructing them and performing with such confident vigor you wouldn’t be surprised if the band burned down the venue. Eleanor Friedberger stares down the crowd through a shaggy brown ‘do, her body rhythmically jerking to the music as she forcefully grasps the microphone and delivers lyrics with immediacy. She embodies the image of the stereotypical male rock ‘n’ roll singer from the ’70s.
“That’s what she’s doing, but with a little bit of a wink, you know what I mean?” said the other half of the brother-sister duo, Matthew Friedberger. “She doesn’t think of herself as Melissa Etheridge or Chrissie Hynde; she thinks of herself as Robert Plant.”
On stage, Matt sits behind a three-sided desk of keyboards, swiveling between each one and turning to give cues to the pair’s backing band like some sort of rock ‘n’ roll puppet master. He arranges all of the instrumentation beforehand and takes responsibility for its live output.
On their new album, “Widow City,” released Oct. 9 on Thrill Jockey Records, The Fiery Furnaces play ’70s rock-inspired music with creative and varied composition, storytelling lyrics and sometimes-spastic tonal changes. Songs switch genres multiple times within themselves, and every track introduces an unexpected element of instrumentation or vocal change.
The lyrics on “Widow City” are story-driven, with dark themes such as unhappy marriages and separated love. Friedberger said his songs usually tell fictional stories as opposed to less-interesting accounts of his and Eleanor’s own lives. He takes his lyrical inspiration from anecdotes people tell him, occurrences he reads about and his own imagination. “The way you articulate it is what’s important, not the supposed experience behind it,” Friedberger explained. “And that’s going to give (the story) immediacy or make it seem sincere or not sincere or whatever it’s supposed to be, whether or not it actually happened to you.”
One of the best songs on the album is actually divided into three approximately two-minute tracks: “Duplexes of the Dead,” “Automatic Husband” and “Ex-Guru.” Friedberger wrote the tracks with the idea of telling a seven- or eight-minute “story song” divided up into shorter, more conventional tracks so that each part could stand on its own as an individual song.
The three tracks tell the story of a woman and her husband who have problems, to say the least. “Duplexes of the Dead” starts the story off as a mellow, swayable rock song with a few instrumental twists. “Automatic Husband” is the most different of the three, alternating between heavy rock jams and talking against light piano. “Ex-Guru” finishes off the story with Eleanor singing in a stronger, more direct tone against energetic rock ‘n’ roll.
Other album highlights include “Navy Nurse,” “My Egyptian Grammar” and “Japanese Slippers.”
Some listeners might not be fans of the duo’s spastic tendencies, which are especially evident in the album’s first song, “The Philadelphia Grand Jury.” The more than seven-minute-long track changes almost schizophrenically from funky beats to airy keyboard solos to hard rock and to what can only be described as dream sequence music. But it works. The song isn’t seamless, but it manages to flow together and recapture the listener’s attention again and again.
With such complex musical composition, it’s almost guaranteed The Fiery Furnaces will have their arguments during the writing process. For this reason, Friedberger said working with a sibling was a lot easier than working with a friend or an acquaintance. “You can argue and even be offended by one another, and it doesn’t necessarily make you mad,” he said. “You’re so used to being annoyed by your siblings that it’s not a shock when they annoy you again.”
This makes the songwriting process much easier because the two never have to spend time reaffirming their friendship or making up after a fight; they just move on. “I’ve met people who are working together (who) if they get into an argument … have to spend a lot of effort face-saving and making everyone feel OK,” he said. “You take your relationship with your siblings for granted to some extent, in a good way.”
It’s easy to imagine the pair squabbling over the placement of an instrument on a track, especially when looking at the painful amount of thought put into every detail of their musical composition, which Friedberger said was inspired by the tone of the lyrics. “What the band is all about, kind of, is sort of musical puns,” he emphasized. “Everything has got to have some excuse.”
He used the sound of the drums on their title track, “Widow City,” as an example of the complex thought process that goes into developing their instrumentation. On the track, The Fiery Furnaces alternate between dead and live drum sounds depending on the story in the lyrics. (Live drum sounds echo as if in a big room, whereas dead drum sounds don’t reverberate.) If Eleanor is singing about talking to a ghost, the drums are dead. When she’s not, they’re live. “All those kinds of decisions are made with storytelling in mind,” Friedberger said. “You’re not supposed to necessarily know that when you’re listening to it, but for me those are the things that are the excuse for all the decisions – writing it and then arranging it and then mixing it.”
Ironically enough, all of the effort put into the instrumentation of their recorded songs gets thrown out of the window when they tour. Friedberger restructures every song, sometimes to the point where it’s virtually unrecognizable. He does this in part to give the crowd a different experience and also to change it up for the band. “It’s already the record, so you want to make a new record,” he explained. “And in between the two approaches to the song, there’s the ideal version somewhere in there.”
The speed and tone of their tracks also vary depending on the venue they perform in. “There’s different sets of decisions you make arranging a song to record it and arranging a song to play it in a bar,” Friedberger described. “Usually playing a little bit faster is natural and more appropriate (when) playing it where people are drinking.”
This logic fuels The Fiery Furnaces to deliver energetic, original and personal sets that no audience member can ever hear again.
The band has finished its American tour and has moved on to Europe to continue promoting “Widow City.” But expect them to return soon. “It’s fun to play in California,” Friedberger said. “Maybe in the next couple of records, we’ll make a California record of subject matter.”
But after a few seconds, he reconsidered. “Well, maybe not the next one.”