Wake Up ILM, there's a new Fiery Furnaces LP

I will only post this one track. And I dont think it would be a good idea to YSI the whole album, this isnt a torrent site.

But you know, if I've learned anything from being a fan of this band, there really is no such thing as a "final version" to them.

Such a Robert Pollard title.

Do I need another CD?

Moral: Never undersell yourself.

The sequencing seems similar in form to that of the new Belle & Sebastian album.

yep, its a return to 'form'

Matthew C Perpetua in loving Fiery Furnaces shockah!

I'm not supercharmed by either of these songs, on first listen. But will defer judgment, obv. Album is veeeery slowly downloading. I find it surprising that I would favour progweirdo Furnaces over popweirdo Furnaces, but whatev.

non xpost

It's my fave FF LP.

Yeah, Malkmus is not very interesting to me. Even the Pavement i love isn't the norm (Brighten the Corners, "Carrot Rope", "Secret Life of Back Roads"). I have a complicated theory linking it to my ambivalence toward electric guitar antics, but it's probably more related to my weird relationship with song lyrics.

Dan, however (of StG), is a massive Pavement/Malkmus fan, and also big-big-big into the Furnaces. So yeah, there does seem to be a "kind of thing" going on. (Interestingly, Dan's other pet bands are things you don't seem to have much time for [Modest Mouse, Wolf Parade, Arcade Fire]; but despite how that might look, he's not at all the conventional indie-rock listener.)

I think Modest Mouse, Wolf Parade, and Arcade Fire are more of a macho, angst-ridden version of this sort of thing, maybe.

But after the first couple of listens, it's listenable at the very least... so much better than Rehearsing

I don't think Wolf Parade or Arcade Fire are like most Pavement or Furnaces stuff at ALL. I just brought it up to articulate that your personal taste isn't necessarily going to be sensible - it's not as easy as breaking it down into pieces and saying "oh you don't like whimsical keyboards and [a given] sense of humour, and that's why our tastes are different".

see, i dont hear this. pavement packs, for me, a MUCH larger (that is to say, existent) emotional punch than FF. pavement melodies to me are wistful, unpredictable, and above all, memorable, where FF songs just seem to clunk along in time-worn chord/melody combinations. whimsy, while certainly not absent to my ears in pavement songs, definitely just complements rather than dominates the proceedings IMHO. anyways, i just HATE the FF so i am going to get off of this thread now; it is not my goal to pour hatorade on the
proceedings here ...

xpost

matt likes to do that 'ironic shredding' thing that SS was doing ten years ago

yep, i like it lots and i think it's stood up well to repeated listening -- if anything, the repeated listening made me appreciate it more.

as far as i can tell, the people who "hate" this album are myopic pitchfork types who only like it when their bands sound like INDIE RAWK.

I find the Furnaces to be an exceptionally warm band, even if there persona can be a little cold. But you know, Malkmus is exactly the same way.

There's a new Fiery Furnaces LP
So wake up ILM!
There's so many things for us to do
But I can't sleep with you there by my side

Wake up, it's a beautiful morning
And also there's a new Fiery Furnaces LP
Wake up, it's so beautiful
For what could be the very last time

It's early so take your time,
Don't let me rush you please
I know I was up all night, I can do anything,
Anything, anything

But you can't blame me
Not for the death of summer
No you can't blame me
Not for the death of summer
But you're gonna say what you wanna say
You have to put the death in everything

YSI?

There's an untitled 15th track, too, but it sounds like it might be Benton Harbor Blues Again, but there's a different song labeled as that.

I kinda see why they wanted this to be part of a two-disc set with Rehearsing My Choir - they certainly work as companion pieces, and you can see a lot of crossover in the musical ideas between the two albums.

There's clearly a problem with the tracklisting - 15 is obviously "Benton Harbor Blues," and 14 seems to be a reprise of "Nevers." I really fell in love with "Benton Harbor Blues Again" on the commute home today. What a beautiful song!

"When I like The Arcade Fire, it's almost entirely because of the fact that they sound like a primitive, awkward version of U2."

so basically because they don't sound like U2?

i thought "rehearsing" was an absolutely incredible record. at the end of the day i prefer it over blueberry. and i'm really loving this bitter tea stuff, hooray for the friedbergers going with fat possum as well.

it seems like their most uneven record, not in terms of quality, terms of flow, different sounds jarring with each other, not the thematic unity of the last two.

so when's the next one out huh

It's good that they're different, unique blah blah but it wouldn't hurt to keep it simple sometimes. Especially where it seems fitting - as in the extra bits (and they feel like distracting extra bits) don't seem to especially serve the purpose of the song. I definitely feel there's sometimes a real unwillingness to let it be/let the song breathe a bit. I had this trouble with some of the songs near the end of Blueberry Boat.

By which I mean, HEY MATT FRIEDBERGER: CHILL THE FUCK OUT

Because otherwise he'll end up as bad as Jools Holland, but instead of a case of the OCD boogie woogies he'll have squelchy keyboard skronk instead.

I like a lot of this new one, I just don't want to listen to it all. TRIM THE FAT, MATT FRIEDBERGER! You don't need to try and use the whole capacity of a cd every time.

Bwahaha. No, I'm working on my "make them actual pop songs" version this weekend.

two faves on new rec so far: "the vietnamese telephone ministry" and "oh sweet woods" -- they're sorta the logical progression from the art of noise- style instrumental introverted-industrial-groove bits that open "quay cur" and "blueberry boat"! i want more stuff like this from them.

I'm way into "Bitter Tea" and "Benton Harbor Blues Again" as well. I kinda wish that I had heard the album version of "Waiting To Know You" first, because I would have liked to have always had that sparkly sound be part of my first impression.

I'm finding this record to be an interesting challenge. The music itself is fairly accessable, but getting my head around it as an album has been tricky and confusing. It feels more like a set of eps/singles - 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-13, 14-15

I get this way about Blueberry Boat and Rehearsing My Choir, but I find that Bitter Tea's best stuff is mostly on the second half of the record. I've been generally playing the album starting with "Bitter Tea" and progressing through from there. I kinda wish they had just kept the second versions of "Nevers" and "Benton Harbor" and saved the alternates for b-sides/reissues.

p.s. the size is not importend (pea).but you probably know that..

i've only played bitter tea a couple of times, but i can already point to five or six songs that i think sound fresh and rank with their best stuff. and many of the lateral moves are pretty okay too.

but:

Maybe I should have also mentioned theres a Billie Jean "sample" in one of the track.

-- snowballing (snowballin...), February 22nd, 2006.

what was this referring to? i haven't noticed it...

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000EQ5Q86.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_V57015745_.jpg

macho??????
wow...i don't know if any of these bands could EVER be labeled 'macho'...by anyone...

fer the record- the pavement/sm/FF similarities begin and end with the lyrics only. not in the songs. not at all...pavement-more squalls of noize mixed w/ some rambunctious song writing. SM= a WAY more low key approach, since his noize side-kick, SS, isn't there to tell him when to make it louder anymore. FF=quirky time signature and medleys and almost a lack of any followable 'song structure'. "BBB" was 'alright' a few good songs with some fodderificness thrown in for good measure.
all this praise, i'm afriad, has done nothing to help them. 'rehearse' seems to just go and go and go and go nowhere.
now, please, BBC, tell me how wrong i am...

they have some in waltz time. ("cousin chris" comes to mind.)

It's not just the lyrics, Ed. It's the singing and a lot of the guitar and keyboard style too.

I think the thing with time signatures is that a lot of people don't really understand what they are, and so anything that doesn't seem rhythmically/structurally normal is assumed to be a time signature thing. I don't fully understand it myself, to be honest, so I try to avoid mentioning it at all.

you think? i wasn't too impressed by the gallowsbird's cover, but blueberry boat and EP were very pretty, again in a mid-century graphic-design mag sorta way.

Like so:

Bitter Tea
Teach Me Sweetheart
Waiting To Know You
The Vietnamese Telephone Directory
Oh Sweet Woods
Borneo
Police Sweater Blood Vow
Nevers
Whistle Rhapsody
Benton Harbor Blues

That whole run from "Bitter Tea" through "Police Sweater Blood Vow" is pretty astonishing, and easily some of their best work.

It's only been two listens, so I'm not going to give up yet - Blueberry Boat bamboozled me at first and by the fourth listen I was hooked. But this is the first of their albums that has left me feeling *completely* cold from start to end. It sounds like they listened to their previous work and said: "Let's do more like this but without the energy or the tunes."

Did anyone here start off feeling disappointed and end up loving it?

"Police Sweater Blood Vow" and "Benton Harbor Blues (Again)" are pretty pop by Furnaces standards, though.

I've figured it out - a normal tune will be repeated umpteen times in the course of a song, so it takes one or two goes for it to sink in. Yer Fiery Furnaces tune only gets a couple of repeats before it's whipped from under yer feet and replaced by something else. So it takes far more listens to take. Obvious but true; in my brane anyway.

I'm still a bit disappointed that this isn't the mad pop gem I wanted it to be - is there a single moment of "Uh! Yessss!" release on the entire album? - but I'm starting to appreciate its more subtle pleasures. Standout fave at the moment is "Teach Me Sweatheart". I want "Police Sweater..." to be fantastic but the deliberate and frustrating lack of climax makes me go "Feh.." towards the end.

"You've got the wrong Eleanor Friedberger!" in "Oh Sweet Woods"

And:

That pizzicato-like keyboard part in "Bitter Tea," and when Eleanor sings "Aren't you curious?" and "I think you're curious..." and the big stompy instrumental sections in that song before Matt starts singing. I can't fathom why more people aren't completely obsessed with this song, honestly.

it's my favorite song on the record, actually.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/17/arts/music/17choi.html

LOve, lovE, love thier new stuff and will buy it this week.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000EQ5Q86.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_V57015745_.jpg http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A9gnMiYV_UhELBcBKDKjzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTA4NDgyNWN0BHNlYwNwcm9m/SIG=124j5tkl3/EXP=1145720469/**http%3a//www.imageexchange.com/shop/media/4033.jpg

Graphic design from the early 1960s by K. Awazu presenting the Metabolist concept of change in housing. High-rise mega-structures support myriad apartment capsules which are modified and replaced according to their own life cycles and the social cycles of demand and fashion.

Actually, I'm fairly certain that none of their albums have been released on vinyl.

Hearing "Benton Harbor Blues" for the first time, the keyboard groove starts up, and I think, "Oh! I really hope this'll be a simple pop song built on that groove, sounds great!" -- but then it drops out, replaced by squelching and whatnot, and my heart sinks a little -- "nuts, it was just a little section, whatta tease" -- but then it starts up again, and it IS a simple pop song built on that groove, and it's GREAT!!

(I like that version, the first one, better than the straightforward reprise, because the way it's messed around sort of complicates the pleasure of the basic groove/melody, making it more satisfying, somehow, than when it's just played through without tension or complication.)

It reminds me of how I like the "dub" version of the Homosexuals' "Hearts in Exile" (as it was originally released?) better than the un-messed-around-with version. It's the same with many remixes that "improve" the original, I guess, though I can't think of any other examples right now. (I think the original song has to be simple enough that it's almost a little too boring without complication, and the messing-with-it makes the simple groove/tune/whatever more pleasurable by clouding it, or allowing it to be itself only intermittently.)

(The grandma album's hard to beat -- it has a particular appeal that most albums don't, and I think I'll be listening to it straight through, once a month or so, for a loooong time... but I'm really happy about the new one so far. They're such a unique band, at least compared to anyone else I'm familiar with... even though some songs "miss" for me, the grand total of what they're doing just impresses and pleases me so much. And I'm REALLY happy they're coming back here on tour so soon, because their live thang is the best!)

i see the backwards-vocals stuff as more part of the texture/fabric than just trying to be wacky and psychedelic.

It will never be my favorite (it's sort of impossible to imagine them beating Gallowsbird's Bark, especially in terms of my sentimentality), but I think it's really great. I was listening to a big chunk of it on the train home yesterday, and it was really working for me. "Borneo" suddenly made a lot more sense somehow. (Not because I was on a train, mind you.)

This is basically what clicked with me for "Borneo" yesterday. I think reading the lyrics helped a bit for that song too.

You really think so? I have to say I completely disagree. THERE IS NEVER A GOOD REASON TO USE A HARPSICHORD-LIKE SOUND. EVER. This is what annoys me most about the last two Furnaces records. Bitter Tea is decent, but I have a feeling I would love it much more were the tack-piano never discovered by Matthew Friedberger. A piano would sound x10 better in every instance, guaranteed.

sorry, i disagree. it's one of my favorite instruments.

I love how it feels like this band is just hitting their stride, four-plus albums in, especially with the production... this album especially has such an exciting, "sky's the limit" feeling about whatever comes next.

(Minor points off for (accidentally?) transposing two of the digits in the Vietnamese Telephone Ministry's phone number, so people from the internets are calling the # on the album without bothering to check first, and bugging the people who live there.)

(Also for that fucking ginormously annoying tone toward the end of "Whistle Rhapsody.")

Matthew Friedberger is one half of the brother and sister duo The Fiery Furnaces. After 3 years of work, he has completed his first solo release, a double album titled Winter Women / Holy Ghost Language School, which will be the first release on August 8, 2006 on the newly formed label 859 Recordings run by Keith Wood in upstate New York.

The first disc, Winter Women, clocking in at one hour, showcases Friedberger's strength as a songwriter, and features some of the most accessible pop songs he's ever written, including the infectious "Ruth versus Richard" and the 60s-tinged "Up the River." Women is intended to be a summer record, full of memorable, catchy and un-ironic pop songs.

The second disc, Holy Ghost Language School, is more experimental - a 46 minute sonic novel with the requisite backwards guitars and strange samples which makes Matt’s work so original. It veers closer to some of the Furnaces' more experimental outings, but it's not outright noise, the album as a whole is bound by a strange sense of structure. Some reference points for this record might be Faust, The Residents, or the most "out" moments of Brian Eno's solo records.

Matt wrote and arranged all the music, played all the instruments (except for some drumming from John McEntire from Tortoise on a few tracks), and sings all the songs. The record was co-produced by Bill Skibbe at Key Club Recording at Benton Harbor, Michigan in March of this year.

The Fiery Furnaces launch their European tour this Thursday in Manchester and will wrap it up with an appearance at All Tomorrow's Parties on May 20th. In June they'll be touring the US with a focus on the West Coast and Midwest.

Winter Women track listing:

1. Under The Hood At The Paradise Garage.

2. The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co. Resignation Letter.

3. Up The River.

4. Ruth versus Richard.

5. Her Chinese Typewriter.

6. Big Bill Crib & His Ladies Of The Desert.

7. Don’t You Remember?

8. Betcha Don’t.

9. PS.213 Mini School.

10. Theme From Never Going Home Again.

11. Motorman.

12. Quick As Cupid.

13. I Love You Cedric.

14. Servant In Distress.

15. Hialeah.

16. Wisconsin River Blues.

Holy Ghost Language School track listing:

1. Seventh Loop Highway.

2. Holy Ghost Language School.

3. The Cross And The Switchblade.

4. I Started Drinking Alcohol At The Age Of Eleven.

5. Do You Like Blondes?

6. Azusa St.

7. Topeka and San Antonio.

8. A Mystical Preparative To Lewdness.

9. Ship Scrap Beach Business.

10. First Day Of School.

11. Things Were Going So Well.

12. All In Vain Or The Opposite.

13. Moral and Epilouge.

Not sure I see it that way. Who knows where the quality material will end up? Will Matt shortchange the FF songbook to boost his solo profile? What it says to me is that the guy is mad prolific, and that perhaps he should spend more time polishing and editing the stuff he has rather than putting things out in a rush job.

that occurred to me before... it's an '80s dylan (that ticcy, clipped empire burlesque voice, which i love) rather than a '60s dylan!

Minor points off for (accidentally?) transposing two of the digits in the Vietnamese Telephone Ministry's phone number, so people from the internets are calling the # on the album without bothering to check first, and bugging the people who live there.)

loser that i am, i looked up all those churches, and they exist -- all of 'em are (like the VTM) in the los angeles area. interesting, because one of the professors in the program i'm starting did a photographic documentation project of ethnic houses of worship in los angeles, and this'd be a nice soundtrack.

(Also for that fucking ginormously annoying tone toward the end of "Whistle Rhapsody.")

i think it's great! it's far enough into the album that we might have drifted our attention away a bit, and it makes us come back in and go GAAHHH! they should use that kind of jarringness more (without making a cliche of it).

I could have saved you the trouble. This guy has already done it:

http://www.goodhodgkins.com/?p=39

i did it before he did, not that he'd know that.

Best of all was the fast, pounding, HEAVY version of the "faster, hammers" song from "Rehearsing My Choir"...

also - what're their live sets like these days (apart from "loud, crunchy...)? '04 style cut-ups/medleys of the two most recent albums/the entire catalogue? fairly straight-ahead run-throughs?

could someone please tell me that among their fiery furnaces following there is a robust, benevolent bootleg community that has samples from all varieties of fiery furnaces dating back to say blueberry boat? any info appreciated. thx.