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The Fiery Furnaces Blueberry Boat Released in 2004 9.9/10 Styles Garage Revival Song Highlights Quay Cur Straight Street My Dog Was Lost But Now He's Found |
"New Rock" is starting to sound like it's passed its use-by date. With the arrival of every band sporting a love of 70s rock and a tailor-made-to-sound-indie style, the garage-revival movement gets that little bit more stale. Blueberry Boat is far from stale. In fact, it's downright exceptional. Be grateful, because for a while there things were looking pretty damn tedious. At the very base of their sound, there's not much to differentiate The Fiery Furnaces from garage-revival stalwarts The White Stripes. They both play blues-tinged rock songs, with stripped back production. The Fiery Furnaces even feature the brother-sister duo of Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger at their core (and unlike the Stripes, there's no mystery as to whether they're really brother and sister). What sets the Fiery Furnaces apart, though, is what they choose to build on top of this foundation. Blueberry Boat's opening track, "Quay Cur" gives you a pretty good impression for what's in store. The song opens with a full 2 minutes of organ effects, meandering about with building intensity. Eventually, Eleanor's vocals kick in, as she sings about a silver locket that was stolen from her. As the song progresses, it becomes apparent that Eleanor is singing in childlike character, a theme which continues throughout the album, giving it an adventurous, storybook appeal. The song continues on for a full ten minutes, style-shifting through nursery rhyme antics, rollicking garage rock and multivocaled sections (alternating with her brother, who sings for about a third of the album), finally closing out the last two minutes with a gentle, subdued wind-down. This track, like many others on the album, races through so many ideas before it's completion that the listener is left feeling a little dizzy. It's this relentless experimentalism that makes every track on Blueberry Boat, even the ones significantly shorter than "Quay Cur," feel epic in scope. The album is generously laced with highlights - little suprises hidden midway through those multi-part epics - that feel like rewards upon rewards. Each verse of "My Dog Was Lost But Now He's Found" changes backing instrumentation yet features the same melody, giving the track a wonderful new-but-still-the-same feel every time the chorus ends. "Mason City" opens with a plodding, disjoint letter reading, only to launch into a blatantly retro guitar solo that would sound ridiculous if it wasn't so much fun to hear. The closer "Wolf Notes" starts off an abstract nightmare of crash-landing instrument glitches, before launching into one of the album's most rousing sections, just in time to be the perfect finale. The Fiery Furnaces quite simply get everything right on Blueberry Boat. It's got all the catchy, retro charm of the garage revival scene's best moments, with the unrelenting creativity that makes a great album into a truly unique one. Unless something better comes along in the next few months, consider this the best album of 2004. Essential listening. |