The Fiery Furnaces - Remember (Thrill Jockey)
1/5
By: Charlie Bradford
Once upon a time I was listening to some radio DJ talking about songs that FBI agents use to torture people at Guantanamo Bay. Songs that made prisoners want to own up to crimes they'd committed (or maybe not committed) simply so they were no longer subjected to the agony of that music. There were the obvious choices, like the Barney The Purple Dinosaur theme tune, Bryan Adams and his 'Everything I Do...' track, plus any Celine Dion or Cheeky Girls. Then there were some shockers, like Rage Against The Machine and System Of The Down - what is it with people who don't like shouting?
Well I would like to now add a new band to this list of truly torturous sounds; a Fiery Furnaces live album. It's very rare for me to put on a CD and to not at least be able to recognise the musical merit or skill; or decide that whilst it's not my thing it may well be other peoples. But there are 51 tracks of this. 51! And many of them are over four minutes long. Physical pain might have been absent, but getting through it still resembled torture.
Remember is, as you might have guessed, a double album; a microcosm of work from the sibling duo Matthew and Eleanor Friedburger recorded while they were out on tour, a record of their live performances going back to 2005. Supposedly, when playing live The Fiery Furnaces "reconstruct and re-arrange their songs, going to great lengths to create versions that vary greatly from the recorded versions...". And it's true, they certainly make interesting live music - tracks move from here to there like a jagged knife cutting through sounds before they've had a chance to grow. There are weird noises a plenty; 'Single Again' is a space odyssey of bangs and whallops.
I'll admit, one thing I do like are the global song titles, even though 'Vietnamese Telephone Ministry' sounds nothing like what you'd expect and there's no hint of a rainforest in 'Borneo'. Tracks like 'Name Game' and 'Tropical Ice Land' are more of what I have decided to call a 'sardine song', as the band just try and fit too much in. What's more, Matthew's flat and meandering not only adds little but at times seems to have no relation to the music at all.
I don't like being this cruel about bands as I'm sure the siblings both put lots of work, blood, sweat and tears into this intensely long album. But I just hope that if I'm ever unlucky enough to find myself in some torture chamber, the fiend responsible for my pain has not read this review.
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