For the past decade and then some, Chicago-raised songwriter Ezra Furman has burrowed his way into the seams of Americana and inflamed the genre with his crackling, tenacious voice. He’s not content to simply reenact the work of titanic American songwriters like Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen, though he uses plenty of the same tools—saxophone, harmonica, fiddle, nylon-stringed guitar, sing-along melodies, a healthy distrust of authority. It’s more like he’s digging up what those big names left behind in the dust. Furman, a queer, Jewish artist with a tenor like a blowtorch, likes to pick at the scabs of the identities that cast him out from the mythos of all-American masculinity, wailing about God, love and mental illness with unhinged fervor. His fourth solo album, Transangelic Exodus, is his most thematically cohesive work to date: a loose narrative about supernatural queer lovers on the run from the law. The misfit feelings surging through his back catalog crystallize here into detailed imagery, giving the album a lurid, cinematic sheen.
Of all the lovers Furman has sung to across his songs, the vampires and the slackers and the zeroes, none appears more vividly than this album’s Angel. He’s introduced on the first track, “Suck the Blood From My Wound,” as a hospital escapee, tearing bandages from his broken wings and bleeding all over the passenger seat of a flashy red Camaro while a guitar riff borrowed from “Baba O’Riley” announces his triumphant jailbreak. “I’m in love with an angel, and a government is after us, and we have to leave home because angels are illegal,” Furman explains in a statement accompanying the album. Ultimately, though, knowledge of that fictional backstory is more or less superfluous to understanding the paranoid thrust of the lyrics. The personal pronouns he uses throughout the album are enough to communicate the urgency of this escape, as is the lust for unmitigated freedom in Furman’s voice as he belts, “Angel, don’t fight it/To them you know we’ll always be freaks.”
The sentiment behind these words, sung in a tone of liberatory joy and not shame, splashes across the album like a glitter bomb. Furman’s freak flag flies directly in the face of the relentlessly heterosexual and unflappably masculine American outcast rendered in John Wayne movies and Elvis Presley songs. If he invokes the trope of a rebel cruising west in a muscle car, it’s only so he can hollow it out and fill it back up with enough lipstick and sequins to supply a season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” But all that color and shine is about more than what we call “pride”; Furman is well aware of the price tag attached to his freedom. On the haltingly upbeat, synth-squiggled “Maraschino-Red Dress $8.99 at Goodwill,” he glances furtively at a thrift store’s cashier while weighing the decision to buy or not to buy. “Sometimes you go through hell and you never get to heaven,” he muses later in the song, entertaining a strain of fatalism common to artists who dart outside heteronormative paradigms. “This whole world is no place at all/No place for a creature like me,” he reiterates on “No Place.” Being openly queer can earn you weird looks at best and a death sentence if you’re unlucky, but forcing it down and pretending it’s not there is a death in itself. Better to choose the path that offers a shot at life. Better to be a creature without a home than not to be a creature at all.
“I don’t mind if I lose my limbs or die/I’ve built a home inside his eyes and I ain’t leaving,” Furman howls on the album’s second track, “Driving Down to L.A.” New production elements bolster the abandon in his words: huge, apocalyptic drums clatter behind him, buoyed on by swells of electronic bass. Transangelic Exodus folds an industrial edge into Furman’s all-American rock palette, deepening the darkness that closes in around his lyrics. So there’s some release at the very end of the album, when the gloom peels away and Furman starts singing about an early sexual encounter with a boy on “I Lost My Innocence.” He doesn’t sound ashamed or even burdened; it’s a light song with a silly melody, a postscript to the album’s narrative, sung as easily and with as much humor as “Jessie’s Girl” or “Cecilia.” He could have left it off the album, could have kept the tracklist focused on its core drama, but he didn’t. After that long, dark drive away from the world, Furman’s earned the right to a jingle about falling for a boy in a leather jacket. He’s kept his spark of wild hope burning so long it’s finally starting to look like a firework.
