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Unlike the White Stripes, who were a fake brother/sister musical duo, the Fiery Furnaces were a real brother/sister musical duo. Eleanor Friedberger is the sister, she always looks kind of stoned and sad. Matthew Friedberger is the brother, he always looks kind of hyper and mad. They grew up near Chicago, and they’ll remind you of this fact constantly in their music.

One of the better examples of ’00s overindulgent indie rock, the duo created highly ambitious and conceptual albums bloated to the nines with extremely colorful electronic and acoustic instruments. Their music was also always dangerously slippery with slick production. The music that they created often sounded like they threw any musical idea they had into a bingo ball machine, spun it frantically, and kicked it down the stairs, for better or for worse. You can’t say that they weren’t inventive, but the music did suffer frequently from their weird-for-the-sake-of-weird approach to songwriting. When they were tight, though, they were tight. They weren’t often tight.

Eleanor handled most of the vocals, Matthew handled most of the songwriting and instrumental performances, although they would switch up from time to time. Eleanor knows how to play guitar and keyboards, and some percussion. The duo split in 2011 to embark on solo careers. In Matthew’s solo career, he does everything almost entirely by himself, and his output is frantic, all over the place, and it sucks. Eleanor, meanwhile, delegates duties to an actual band and has four good albums under her name. The solo output has made it clear to me who was the more grounded of the two during their Fiery Furnaces days.

The siblings are still on an extended hiatus, but they did release a single in June 2020 “Down at the So and So on Somewhere”, likely inspired by pandemic lockdown. Whether or not they’re returning for an actual project is unclear at this time.

Oh yeah, Franz Ferdinand’s lead singer Alex Kapranos used to date Eleanor Friedberger. The Franz Ferdinand hit “Eleanor Put Your Boots On” was about her. Maybe her feet stink.

The Fiery Furnaces’ Bandcamp page

JUMP TO:
(2003) Gallowsbird’s Bark
(2004) Blueberry Boat
(2005) EP
(2005) Rehearsing My Choir

Gallowsbird’s Bark (2003) – Rating: 9/10
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If two supposed siblings making music together in 2003 didn’t dredge up immediate White Stripes comparisons, then the crunchy indie folk-garage sound of the Fiery Furnace’s first album absolutely should or your money back!

But never fear, the Fiery Furnaces are not at all a White Stripes ripoff band. There’s a lot of ground covered by their piano-driven blues and rock music, bringing to mind Elton John, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and many others, but really only in the “classic rock era” sense. If the Fiery Furnaces were alive in the ’60s and ’70s to make this music they would be among good company. Gallowsbird’s Bark has all the genuine flair and melodic songwriting sensibilities of the bygone era. That’s a high compliment.

The music itself is whimsical. Positive and mischievous and eccentric. Most of the spotlight is consumed by piano scales and twisty, psychedelic guitar passages. “South Is Only a Home” is the perfect opener to showcase their sensibilities right out of the gate, just a perfectly sunny slice of engaging piano rock. Each track provides a different angle of the siblings’ desire to merge their playfulness with their offbeat approach to accessible, slightly wry songwriting.

But, standing out more than anything else are Eleanor’s weird lyrics. There’s no poetry or metaphor in something like “I slit my wrists with my Swingline/Copied myself 500 times/I pierced my ears with a three-hole punch/Ate twelve dozen donuts for lunch” when describing office work in “I’m Gonna Run”, that’s for damn sure. Or how about “Leaky Tunnel”: “Dirty boy said let’s make in love in the water/I said, ‘No thanks, Pal’” Almost every song leads the listener through a thorny narrative, but then you get head-scratchers like “Two Fat Feet”: “I’ve got a busted breast and a jiggly thigh/A rumpled roast and a ragged eye/A floppy neck and two fat feet/Sneaky cheeks chewin’ greasy gums“. What the fuck is Eleanor talking about? Who cares! There’s so much charm here it makes me wanna puke in a fantastic way!

The debut is the Fiery Furnaces at their best, there’s no doubt. Touches of this straightforward pub indie rock will show up throughout their career, but never again with so much focus.

Blueberry Boat (2004) – Rating: 6/10
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More like Blueberry BLOAT! Eh? Eh? Ehhh.

If Gallowsbird’s Bark was the duo showing restraint to get their feet in the door, then Blueberry Boat represents what happens when they’re faced with a sense of completely unlimited freedom. 76 minutes, 13 tracks with 5 of them over 7 minutes, 20 different instruments, extremely dense arrangements, progressive song structures, full use of every electronic sound effect and manipulation you can possibly utilize. This release is the musical equivalent to an entire tray of the richest, sweetest fudge in the world. And you’re expected to eat all of it one sitting.

That right there is the sticking point. This music is fun! It’s total fun! It’s catchy, sprawling, bouncy, playful, addictive, and constantly, constantly, full of surprises. To that end, it’s absolutely exhausting and extremely hard to absorb on any sort of level that reaches relaxing enjoyment. It’s one of those albums that you can really get into at first with sheer excitement, but by the end you’re worried that too much of a good thing will sour the fun. And it does. It does for me every time.

I’m glad “Quay Cur”, the 10-minute opener and Blueberry Boat‘s longest song, kicks things off. I would tell this track to go fuck itself if it were later in the sequencing, because here sequencing is all that matters. The stuff you like is at the front end, and the stuff you like less is at the back end simply because you’re getting burnt out on all that sweet, sweet fudge. So, yes, for my money, my limit is right about at Track 7 “Mason City”; about 40 minutes in. Lo and behold, if you wait a day and start the album from “Mason City”, the back half sounds a bit better, doesn’t it?

Gotta hand it to the Friedberger’s though. A lot of this stuff is bold and weird and just plain quaint. In the hands of better musical geniuses, something like Blueberry Boat could be trimmed by half into something absolutely spellbinding. Pitchfork gave this album a fucking score of 9.6. Luckily Arcade Fire’s Funeral came out in the same year (which scored 9.7) or everyone would still be talking about their embarrassing choice for the top album of 2004 to this very day.

EP (2005) – Rating: 8/10
No Full Album Review Yet

The deceptively-named third album is actually 41 minutes long, but I guess after Blueberry Boat any album would be considered an EP.

This is a marked improvement, but a true album this ain’t. EP is a glorified compilation album that collects all of the singles and B-sides that were (barely) previously released, plus two new songs. Besides trimming 30 minutes, EP also trims a lot of excessive electronic sound effects and voice modulation, resulting in a way more grounded indie pop record. The oddly charming lyrically-dissonant dark humor continues, with the first track “Single Again” displaying the most overt example (Eleanor sings lines like “He beat me he banged me, he swore he would hang me/And I wish I was single again” over cheerful music). Or maybe in “Smelling Cigarettes” where “Stunned I stayed put and a billboard truck runs over my foot“. Or maybe in “Sweet Spots” where Eleanor recounts an amusing anecdote about sneaking into a candy factory with sarcastic “A-DOO-DOO-DAH-DAH-DOO-DAH” vocal overlays. Any hints here and there of straying toward the needless abundance of Blueberry Boat are tastefully averted in the nick of time. Even the reworked version of “Tropical-Iceland” from their debut, while packed more with expanded surprises than the stripped-down original, is just as good, if not better, this time around! And it was a great song in the first place!

The Fiery Furnaces are at their best and most endearing when they’re not being deliberately obnoxious. There’s nothing particularly cathartic about EP, but it’s a fun record and the best example of the siblings can accomplish with some goddamned self-discipline. Or at least it proves that they kept it way simpler in their early days.

Rehearsing My Choir (2005) – Rating: 3/10
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God. You know what, I feel bad for this one. If it’s not obvious yet that the Friedberger siblings put a ton of effort into their work, here comes Album #4: an indescribably ambitious old-timey radio play featuring their own grandmother. It’s sweet of them to do this, they obviously thought highly of her and used their pseudo-celebrity status to elevate her. But it sucks, man.

Their grandmother, Olga Sarantos, plays herself and provides the vocals (except when Eleanor plays a younger version of her). Stories are told about her life growing up in the Chicagoland area, jumping around the timeline and spanning the 1920s to the 2000s, stories of a bygone era about young passions, lost loves, all mostly about her relationship with her husband, his death, and her grief. But there’s some stuff in there too about gypsy curses, Christmas Day church TV marketing, a doctor healing a bullet wound using blackberry jelly, and a bunch of others.

Sounds really interesting, right? Well, it could’ve been, but all the stories are complete stream-of-consciousness ramblings from a woman with an irritating blue-collar old woman voice, and there’s so much talking in lieu of singing that no one’s patience can withstand it for a whole damn hour. A lot of the piano music does complement the modest radio-play format, but Matthew overloads the arrangements with layers and layers of squeaky, bloopy, synthy, Blueberry Boat bullshit until it’s beyond tiresome. Plus, the music shifts so suddenly and so often that I don’t think there’s a single melody to be found on the record.

I give points for only two reasons: 1) Sarantos is not only a willful, eager participant, but nothing about listening to Rehearsing My Choir makes me cringe uncomfortably at her involvement. And thank fucking God for that. 2) On paper, this is one of the most original ideas I’ve ever encountered for a concept album. In practice, though, it’s a complete flop, and maybe someone more musically talented than the Friedbergers could’ve made it work. More often than not, my praise for Eleanor and Matthew targets their vision and not their execution, and Rehearsing My Choir is the most glaring example of this in their whole career.

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