"Matthew Friedberger requests fan's screenplays and videos," went an email promoting one of the multimedia aspects of Friedberger's latest solo venture, the 45-track "opera" that is Matricidal Sons of Bitches. That misplaced apostrophe accidentally says an awful lot: Since the Fiery Furnaces released I'm Going Away in 2009, their most accessible album to date, Matthew Friedberger hasn't exactly been on a charm offensive. He entered into a bizarre, one-sided, and intolerably lengthy internet fight with Thom Yorke and Beck, and between January 2011 and January 2012, released eight solo records, each performed on a single instrument in order to demonstrate the "Cretan-Lacedaemonian principle," where "every group of instruments is against every other group of instruments, every instrument is against every other instrument, and, finally, every instrument is against itself." He appears to have invented the principle, and you'll struggle to find anyone who stuck around for all eight records. (This was while his sister, Eleanor, released her gorgeous, underrated solo debut, Last Summer.) It's easy to interpret his behavior as a mission to whittle his fans' number down to single digits.
In an interview with Under the Radar magazine subtitled "Breaking the Law of Diminishing Returns" from October 2011, Friedberger, who now lives in Paris, opined that as older artists become more or less comfortable with writing to fit their songwriting character, their audience often becomes less comfortable with the fact. "They don't say, 'They're so confident. They're really exploring what they're able to do. They're testing the boundaries.' Bullshit like that. They say the other bullshit like, 'They're self-indulgent. They're pretentious.'" Acceptance or rejection; you get the impression he doesn't care for either. Somewhat pointlessly, I sometimes think about a game where you try to lose every Twitter follower you have, but without being actively hateful or idiotic; doing so in a calculated fashion to be as off-putting as possible. Matricidal Sons of Bitches would be very good at this game.
The concept here (though it really only exists on paper) is that Matricidal Sons of Bitches is a four-part opera about, you guessed it, mother-snuffing sons. The four parts are titled, "LADIES-IN-WAITING--waiting forever", "BRAND-NEW-MOTHERS--trying it out", "EXPECTANT FATHERS--in for a surprise", and "DYING ON THE SIXTH SIDE", and the atmosphere is suitably ominous. Opening song "The Neighbors" features a French woman describing (in English) the members of her family she has hated, none more so than her mother, a revelation backed by a huge thunderclap. There are drawings of bog-eyed men on the album's cover-- Peter, Charlie, Perry, Marco, Julian, and the baroque-haired Michael, presumably the sons-- on the back of which it says, "Neither written nor produced nor directed by Matthew Friedberger." It is immensely difficult to listen to start to finish. You know how people wear Trout Mask Replica as a badge of musical endurance? Van Vliet just got usurped.
What puts listeners in a difficult spot is that, no matter how infuriating it gets, Matricidal Sons of Bitches is clearly the product of serious compositional intention; it's not an accidental mess. Friedberger has a tremendous skill for creating snippets of what sound like old classics that never existed in the first place: "But at the Door; Is it Him?", "The Next Morning", "As If in the Car With the Kids", and "Lying on the Sixth Side" sound like theme tunes to family TV specials broadcast in Hawaii in the 1950s. "Frustration by the Boulevards" and "Drifting Down the Alleys" are so authentically like the soundtracks to wartime socials that they should have their own signature dance move. These pieces stutter and stop before their natural conclusions, making them feel like samples for the Avalanches to come in and repurpose, and they're full of beautifully warm, playful piano that seems made to soundtrack charming stop-motion mechanisms and families singing together. It's a kind of compact, cuckoo-clock portrait of togetherness. Which, given the record's murderous concept, was only made to be destroyed.
Friedberger's renderings of situations where dangerous scions lurk can be extremely evocative. "Tell Me What it is You Want, Boys" veers between sounding like an old blues 45 and someone sucking ghosts through the holes of a violin that's played many a cursed tune. (It also manages to sound like the "Peanuts" music played in "Arrested Development" when George Michael is particularly crestfallen.) The title track is a 42-second long, hypnotic meeting of abrasively bright synthesizer and watery harp blooms that feels like an invitation to dine with a sea beast in his cave, and, by the way, you're dessert.
There's a limited palette here that's perhaps meant as some kind of conclusion to the single-instrument records, which is interesting in theory, but too often seems like Friedberger filled a Casio keyboard with his own monstrous presets and jabbed away until some kind of song came out. Worst of all is when he picks the setting marked "sounds from space." "Pursuit, Less Acute" is a rasping attempt at Wagnerian intergalactic bombast that brings to mind a dying Darth Vader trying to hum his own once-menacing theme. As the record progresses, Friedberger continually and insistently deploys the sound of a dry, choked explosion, the kind used to convey the words "error" or "do not pass" or "YOU HAVE FAILED START AGAIN" on a video game.
Songs rarely end with any resolution; instead stopping dead and veering into the next turn unannounced. The fragmentation of the Books' loosely comparable Music For a French Elevator remained compact and coherent; Friedberger, on the other hand, thinks nothing of interrupting a flurry of lovely harp strums with an unbearable, high-pitched drone, only to return to the harp again seconds later. Combined with the record's main motif, repeated to a madness-inducing extent-- a piano clank surrounded by a gray drone that waxes and wanes to various degrees-- the constant feel of blocked paths and missed turns brings on the kind of stomachache that usually occurs when your GPS packs up in a maze of backwater lanes.
At this stage of his career, Matthew Friedberger comes across like the Andy Kaufman of indie rock, though these days he's less an outlier of the field than an errant baseball thwacked miles beyond its borders. Is he more interested in the process of challenging people's expectations or sustaining a career? It's hard not to feel that he's pissing on his chips with each successive release, but the intent behind what you could term his professional self-destruction renders the piss and chips a more artisanal dish, though it's unlikely to curry much favor.
